Andrea Bennett-Design Studies - Theory and Research in Graphic Design-Princeton Architectural Press (2006)

design
studies
design
studies
THEORY AND RESEARCH
IN GRAPHIC DESIGN
A U D R E Y B E N N E T T, E D I T O R
FOREWORD BY STEVEN HELLER
P R I N C E T O N A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R E S S , N E W YO R K
This book is dedicated to Wassily Kandinsky
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Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Editor: Scott Tennent

Designer: Miko McGinty
Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Dorothy Ball, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning,
Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, John King,
Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson,
Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton
Architectural Press
Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
L i b r a r y o f Co n g r e s s C ata lo g i n g - i n - P u b l i c at i o n Data
Design studies : theory and research in graphic design / Audrey Bennett, editor ;
foreword by Steven Heller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-597-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-586-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Commercial artPhilosophy. 2. Commercial artResearch. I. Bennett, Audrey.
NC997.D449 2006
741.6072dc22
2006000777
TABLE OF CONTENTS
acknowledgments 9
foreword Better Skills through Better Research 10

Steven Heller
i n t ro d u c t i o n The Rise of Research in Graphic Design 14

Audrey Bennett
SECTION I Visionary Perspectives
chapter 1 Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science? 26

Jorge Frascara
chapter 2 Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience 36

in Visual Communication
Ann C. Tyler
chapter 3 From Formalism to Social Signicance 51

in Communication Design
Jodi Forlizzi and Cherie Lebbon
chapter 4 Being Serious, Being Popular: 64

Positioning Design Research
Liz C. Throop
chapter 5 Activity Theory: A Model for Design Research 73

Judy DAmmasso Tarbox
SECTION II Design Inquiry
chapter 6 Triangle, Square, Circle: A Psychological Test 84

Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller
chapter 7 Visual Design of Interactive Software 89

for Older Adults
Zoe Strickler and Patricia Neafsey
chapter 8 Sharpening Ones Axe: Making a Case 117

for a Comprehensive Approach to Research
in the Graphic Design Process
Paul J. Nini
chapter 9 Design Methodologies: Toward a 130

Systematic Approach to Design
Matt Cooke
chapter 10 The Utility of Design Vision and 147

the Crisis of the Articial
Mark Roxburgh
chapter 11 Communication Research: Theory, 158

Empirical Studies, and Results
Peter Storkerson
chapter 12 Audience as Co-designer: Participatory 179

Design of HIV/AIDS Awareness and Prevention
Posters in Kenya
Audrey Bennett, Ron Eglash, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy,
and Marie Rarieya
SECTION III Designing Culture
chapter 13 Graphic Design in a Multicultural World 200

Katherine McCoy
chapter 14 Encoding Advertisements: Ideology and 206

Meaning in Advertising Production
Matthew Soar
chapter 15 Directed Storytelling: Interpreting 231

Experience for Design
Shelley Evenson
chapter 16 Dezyne Klass: Exploring Image-making 241

through the Visual Culture of Hip Hop
John Jennings
chapter 17 A Step Ahead of Praxis: The Role of 256

Design Problem Denition in Cultural
Ownership of Design
Peter Martin
chapter 18 Mediating Messages: Cultural Reproduction 273

through Advertising
Seval Dlgeroglu
Yavuz
chapter 19 Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams: 291

An Interview with Toni OBryan
Audrey Bennett
SECTION IV Human-Centered Design
chapter 20 Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts 300

on the Principles of Human-Centered Design
Richard Buchanan
chapter 21 Impact: Inspiring Graphic Design 306
through Human Behaviors
Roshi Givechi, Ian Groulx, and Marc Woollard
chapter 22 Personas: Practice and Theory 311

John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin
c h a p t e r 23 Educating Design Citizens: Passing on 333

a Mind, Body, Spirit Practice
Ann C. Tyler
chapter 24 In Between: Challenging the Role of 354

Graphic Design by Situating It in a
Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Class
Ann McDonald
SECTION V Further Reading
a n n o tat e d b i b l i o g r a p h i e s o f t h e f o r m e r
g r a p h i c d e s i g n e d u c at i o n a s s o c i at i o n
Introduction Meredith Davis 372
Cultural Studies Bibliography Andrew Blauvelt 373
Cognition and Emotion Bibliography Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders 401
Design Planning Bibliography Ewan Duncan 415
Education and Learning Theory Bibliography Meredith Davis 431
interdisciplinary bibliography for design researchers 445
about the contributors 453

index 459
image credits 464
acknowledgments
This collection would not have been possible without the support and
generosity of the contributors. I am grateful to the Institute for Information
Design, Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, How magazine, Meredith Davis,
and the editor of Visible Language, Sharon Poggenpohl, for allowing me
to reprint select articles, bibliographies, and graphics. I am indebted to
the following people who agreed to be readers of the introduction:
Sylvia Harris, information design strategist and former design critic at
Yale University School of Art; Kermit Bailey, associate professor of graphic
design at North Carolina State University; Dr. Alan Nadel, professor,
Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rensselaer;
and my husband, Dr. Ron Eglash, associate professor of science and
technology studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am overwhelmed
with appreciation for the generosity of the following people who shared
their time, knowledge, and experiences with me during sabbatical visits
that led to the compilation of this volume: Jorge Frascara, Dr. Elizabeth
B.-N. Sanders, Milton Glaser, Nancy Skolos, and G. K. Van Patter. Janice
Darling and Rensselaer undergraduates Timothy Lee and Jocelyn Pleines
provided valuable assistance. Last, I wish to thank editors Scott Tennent
and Clare Jacobson at Princeton Architectural Press for their support of
this collection and guidance in its development.
foreword
Better Skills through

Better Research
STEVEN HELLER
As the most eKective way to guarantee jobs, art and design schools have
traditionally prepared students for the trade. Yet just as traditionally,
debates continually rage between those who teach design for social or
cultural purposes and those who follow accepted formulae to solve
routine problems. Not every designer can be on the cultural cutting
edge, of course, but few want to be considered production slaves either.
Educators charged with training skilled practitioners have therefore
sought out more proactive curricula to help dene the eld as equal
parts craft, art, and business. The term graphic designer, as coined by
W. A. Dwiggins in 1922, was meant to confer a loftier professional
standing than the more common and now archaic commercial artist.
However, in recent years even this job description has been scrutinized
as too mundane, replaced by communications designer, graphic
communicator, media consultant, and lets not forget all the titles
with branding as prex or sugx.
During the 1980s hybrid concepts harvested from literature, sociology,
and even architecture were planted in graphic design classes to raise
levels of design discourse that in turn would enable the professional
practice to grow in stature. With a liberal sprinkling of isms, graphic
design could be discussed as a cultural force, wrote Emigre magazines
10
Rudy VanderLans, equal to and even uttered in the same breath as higher
arts. Theory with a capital T became an integral discipline in graduate
schools, as well as in some progressive undergraduate programs.
Academics argued that graphic design was more than the mere study of
technique and technology, more than form and functionit was an
intellectual pursuit that demanded philosophical uency.
Although practical theories like color, perception, and symbolism
have been taught as far back as the Bauhaus in fundamental coursework,
the invocation of theoretical terms like semiotics and deconstruction in
the 1980s provided greater cachet in academic corridors and extended
into critical thinking outside the academy, too. Although these theories
provided useful foundations on which to build teaching methodologies,
they also triggered ephemeral styles such as so-called deconstructive
typography, which gave credence to the perception that graphic design
was based more on style than substance.
During the late 1990s, in part as a way to counterbalance the perceived
primacy of style, theory branched into a new rigor called authorship.
The designer as author was initially a kind of academic-speak for anyone
who self-generated work that sidestepped the typical client brief. It was
also an umbrella under which designers who experimented outside of
marketplace constraints could explain their motivations as free-thinkers.
But more importantly, authorship was always about designers expanding
their inuence as creators rather than mere packagers of content.
While this practice was not totally newit arguably dates back to the
late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movementdening authorship
as an academic sub-discipline made it more concrete, and therefore
easier to insert into certain formulaic curricula. Rather than only teaching
accepted techniques, teachers used the widespread accessibility of
desktop publishing and font-making computer programs under the rubric
of authorship to encourage expanding the conventional boundaries of
graphic design.
Authorship subsequently turned into three separate though
sometimes intersecting avenues: the academic notion of authoring
original designs and/or design texts with experimental intentions based
on theoretical roots; the literal denition of being an author of words
and images that employ design to frame and/or package ideas and
messages; and nally, entrepreneurship, including the independent
11
development of a wide range of products also using design to frame or
package. All three serve to nudge graphic design away from being a
trade and into the cultural realm, and further provide students with
practical options. But for students to arrive at a place where they can,
in fact, implement these authoring possibilities, they must be taught to
think in ways that transcend the typical problem-solution routine.
The most recent discourse to hit academia centers around the
old/new process of quantiable research, or rationalizing through
data why particular designs are produced and for what purpose. Rather
than simply judging or basing graphic design on aesthetics aloneif it
looks good, it is goodsome students are now required to develop
rationales and justify them through various quantiable means. Certainly
blue-sky experimentation is a necessary component of any solid
education, but without a well-articulated reason for action, even the most
sublime experiments are tissue-thin and just as imsy. Understanding
the who, what, where, when, and of course why of a design cannot be
underestimated. Without a viable matrix of justication or the ability to
argue and question and discover, design is merely an act of faith.
Research is not, however, some pedagogic make-work or
punishment. It is rather a necessary dimension in undergraduate and
graduate programs. Every student who has matriculated through a
primary or secondary school has grappled with research projects, and
design research is no diKerent from other forms of research. In fact, it is
quite elementary: a proposition or theory that requires proof must be
examined from various vantage points to achieve an outcome, and the
outcome governs how a design solution will be executed.
Nonetheless, research in the design discipline has also traditionally
been something of a bugaboo. While appreciating its value in certain
circumstances, designers realize it has proven to be a double-edged
sword. Among marketing experts, for instance, research often means the
diKerence between success and failure, and so the reliance on testing a
products design virtues with focus groups has often become a holy act
that has squelched good work. No wonder the complaints among designers
are common: too much research and testing can spoil the freshness of
design; too many voices heard from results in the lowest common
denominator; too much overanalyzing lessens the intuitive spark. And
while these woes are not altogether spurious, damning all research is
12 DESIGN STUDIES
like rejecting all instinct. The fact is graphic design, indeed all design, is
not produced in a vacuum. If the correct structures are in place, outside
inuences must be considered and also prevail.
Training students to produce eKective research is a positive addition
to their skill-set. How they are taught to research so it enhances their
physical output as it expands their creative freedom is the next big
academic challenge.
HELLER: FOREWORD 13
introduc tion
The Rise of Research

in Graphic Design
AUDREY BENNET T
Graphic design is at a crossroads. Looking back, one sees designers

engaged in a process where intuition informs the development of visual
rhetoric intended to evoke a response from a target audience. Looking
ahead, one sees them engaged in a process where research is integrated
into the design of objects and experiences for and with the audience. By
adopting interdisciplinary research approaches, graphic designers can
both question and agrm their intuitive inclinations, and place this process
in conversation with peers and even the lay public. Traditionally graphic
design theory has privileged intuition and creativity over empirical
research. This book seeks to provide an alternative approach to graphic
design theory by surveying the best work, past to present, on research-
based graphic design theory.
The question then is: what are graphic designs theories? It can be
argued that the art-based principles of graphic designincluding (but
not limited to) contrast, hierarchy, repetition, alignment, and colorare in
fact theories proven through a long history of successful experimentation
in practice.1 Indeed, graphic designersthrough professional practice
have tested and retested to the point where it makes sense to refer to
these theories as laws or principles. Marty Neumeiers and James
Souttars analyses of the work of John Rushworth, Massimo Vignelli,
14
Nancy Skolos, and Chuck Close, conrm the replicability of these
principles to create aesthetics that sell ideas, products, and experiences.2
Yet within the discipline of graphic design these principles are not
regarded as proven theories because graphic design historically lacks
a strong research agenda. On the contrary, graphic designpartly
because of its arts agliationhas developed a reputation as an
intuition-fueled practice, based primarily on talent.3 Practitioners who
do opt to inform their intuition with theory typically look to other
disciplines within the humanities and sciences. Cognitive, semiotic,
rhetorical, cultural, social, and literary theories have long been popular
choices among graphic designers.4
The process of deriving theory through research is common in most
disciplines within the sciences and even in some humanities. One can
follow the development of theories in a discipline by reading its scholarly
writings penned primarily by academics. There is an evolving intellectual
oeuvre from which practitioners can retrieve, evaluate, and use the
theories and methods to guide and inform their work. Within the design
discipline, there are scholarly journals that report research ndings and
theoretical perspectives on graphic design topics. However, because of
its intuitive-based nature, practitioners of graphic design have not
followed the lead of its scholars. Instead what exists is an intellectual
chasm between practice and research with practitioners leading the way.
intuition in graphic design

Intuitiondened by Paul Rand as a ash of insight conditioned by
experience, culture, and imagination5is invaluable to a graphic
designer. The key role of intuition in graphic design emerged in part
from the work of modernist predecessors such as Rand, W. A. Dwiggins,
and Bradbury Thompson, who founded, dened, and promoted the
discipline as an intuitive practice that could also be used as a strategic
tool for business.6 Graphic design is indebted to these practitioners
whose creative prowess uplifted the discipline, giving it a visible, national
recognition. Their individual eKorts, among others, reinforced a
precedent already set by the art and architecture industries. Therefore,
the focus of graphic design became inevitably the development of
commercial design work that wins competitions. Winning juried
competitions/exhibitions sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic
15
Arts (AIGA), Communication Arts, Print, New York Type Directors Club,
and the former American Center for Design, among others, has long
been the determinant of a graphic designers fame and fortune. As a
result of such highly coveted recognition, the disciplines scope of
knowledge has largely been published in the form of critical writings
analyzing design and how-to books aiming to nurture the professional
graphic designers practical expertise. For instance, in a tongue-in-cheek
yet thoughtful essay, one famous graphic designer, Michael Bierut,
advises the neophytes who would follow in his footsteps on techniques
for winning design competitions.7 Elsewhere, Ross MacDonald and James
Victore oKer modern business tips for use in professional contexts that
involve editors, clients, and others.8 The AIGAs Design Archive showcases
over a thousand design projects that have been juried, all of which
epitomize good visual design.9 Seldom, if at all, is the actual content
written by the graphic designers who produced the aesthetics, in part
because graphic designers typically do not have editorial control of their
work. Authorship stimulates research activity. The graphic designer-as-
author is a new phenomenon, still in its infancy, that has the potential to
debunk the assumption that graphic designers are non-readers and -writers
since authorship requires visual and verbal skills, creative and critical
thinking skills.
In recent years, many graphic designers have begun to evaluate
more rigorously the issues surrounding what they create and the impact
of graphic design artifacts on society at large.10 The 2000 rebirth of the
First Things First Manifesto of 1964, though controversial, marks the
start of this new wave of introspective examination.11 It urges graphic
designers to think more about the broader historical, political, cultural,
and social issues concerning the things they design. The subsequent
publication of books such as Looking Closer 4 in 2002 and Citizen Designer
in 2003 represent an intellectual materialization of the manifestos
tenets.12 They can be considered proof of graphic designers renewed
commitment to social responsibility.
The First Things First Manifesto 2000 was a logical succession
of postmodernist perspectives such as Sheila Levrant de Brettevilles,
which debunked modernisms tenets of universalism.13 Postmodernism
brought about an acknowledgment of individual choice inuenced by
cultural preference, due in large part to a collective awakening of
16 DESIGN STUDIES
multicultural awareness and appreciation (as opposed to assimilation)
brought on in large part by globalization.14 It is in our contemporary
society that a need to understand the audience becomes a major concern
for the designer.15 This need to consider the audience and include them
in the design process, particularly in regard to the design of interactive
media, may be what motivated graphic design practitioners to adopt
research methods instead of relying solely on their intuition.16 While we
think of these innovations in terms of our present moment, it may be the
epistemological equivalent of the eighteenth centurys Enlightenment
Eraa time to overthrow rule by church and king and replace them with
reason and democracy.
visionary perspec tives

The rst section of this book, Visionary Perspectives, includes
theoretical positions that inspire change in graphic design. To begin,
Jorge Frascara grapples with social responsibility in graphic design. He
denes graphic design as an activity that organizes visual communication
in society and urges designers to re-examine their craft through the
lens of social science in order to measure the impact of their work on
society. This is followed by Ann Tylers Shaping Belief, in which she
advocates for audience consideration as a necessary component in the
design process. She argues that the audience is an active participant
because they possess cultural beliefs that inuence their interpretation
of visual language. Thus, the visual communicator cannot shape the
audiences belief without rst understanding them. Tylers essay is based
upon design theorist Richard Buchanans philosophy that a goal of
communication is to induce a belief in the audience.17 Jodi Forlizzi and
Cherie Lebbon build on Buchanans and Tylers arguments through a
contemporary, real-world communication problem. Their essay describes
a user-centered design process that London-based Wire Design (in
consultation with Lebbon) used to design a knife safety campaign for a
community in South London. Liz C. Throop, in her essay, advocates for a
more rigorous research-driven design process beyond merely asking the
audience what they think of a design prototype. The section concludes
with Activity Theory: A Model for Design Research, in which Judy
DAmmasso Tarbox introduces a psychology-based paradigm for design
research.
B E N N E T T: I N T RO D U C T I O N 17
design inquiry
Collaborative approaches to design research, like those presented in
section two, Design Inquiry, include participatory, contextual, and
other subsets of user-centered design. Each collaborative approach
makes the audience a partner in the design of new knowledge.18
Collaborative design can be understood at several diKerent levels. At
one level, it suggests that the designer is freed from the arbitrary reign
of intuition, and that anythingeven fundamental principlescan be
questioned by working with the audience throughout the design process.
At another, it implies that the absolute authority of the designer can be
questioned by fostering the audiences agency throughout the design
process. A third level might be the designs social context: democratizing
the design process empowers people to protect themselves from
manipulation by media,19 since control of content and its visualization
are shared between the graphic designer and the audience.
One can argue that the discipline of graphic design is also a microcosm
of a society. Its scholars, practitioners, and students contribute to this
micro-societys knowledge of itself and its environment. But, like our own
macro-society, the graphic design discipline must balance its meritocracy
with a democracy that empowers all participants, including the
audienceregardless of ethnicity, culture, or social stratumwith access
to information and agency to contribute to the collective knowledge. In
the absence of democracy, success is based upon the opinions of the
elitethe proverbial old boys network. Collaborative approaches to design
facilitate a democratic design process that values diverse opinions and
fosters audience participation.
In Design Inquiry, contributors report the ndings of collaborative
research projects theyve conducted and outline their daring and
rigorous research methodologies, starting with a discussion about what
may be one of the rst documented examples of empirical inquiry in
graphic design history when, in 1923, Wassily Kandinsky conducted a
research experiment on the relationship of color to form in human
perception. He asked students and teachers at the Bauhaus to color what
he saw as the three basic shapes (triangle, square, and circle) a primary
color (yellow, red, or blue) and to provide an explanation for their choice
of color for each shape. Kandinskys intent with this experiment was to
determine a universal relationship between form and color in the eye of
18 DESIGN STUDIES
the viewer. His ndings contributed to modernism and the ontological
perspective that the interpretation of visual language is universal across
cultures. In 1990 Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller re-conducted Kandinskys
psychological test with designers, educators, and critics. Their essay,
reprinted here, reports their ndings within a contemporary framework.
Zoe Strickler and Patricia Neafsey follow with their report on a user-
centered research project to design an education software program for
an elderly populationan audience often overlooked when it comes to
design research. The data they collected assisted them in designing a
visual interface more user-friendly for their audience. Paul Nini, in his
essay Sharpening Ones Axe, introduces a research methodology for
the design process that is based upon participatory principles of design,
while Matt Cooke, a British designer based in the U.S., outlines his own
structured approach to conducting user-centered research with Design
Methodologies. Australian graphic design researcher Mark Roxburgh, in
his essay The Utility of Design Vision and the Crisis of the Articial,
relays a methodology for visual communication research borrowed from
visual anthropology and visual sociology. Meanwhile, Peter Storkerson
argues that understanding how people think can help designers measure
empirically the eKectiveness of communication designs. In the last chapter
of this section, a multidisciplinary team and I report a graphic design
research project in which we used a participatory approach to design an
HIV/AIDS poster campaign for and with fellow Kenyans. We argue that
the participants would have a better sense of the kind of visual language
needed to eKect behavior change among the intended mass audience
other Kenyans. Overall, the essays in this section conrm that graphic
design research is feasible and necessary.
designing culture
Most designers today acknowledge that individual choice is inuenced
by cultural experience.20 Therefore, when they do not share the same
culture with the audience, they can adopt user-centered methods rather
than relying solely on their intuition. The underlying assumption is that
audience participation in the design process will generate culturally
appropriate aesthetics that resonate with the audience. The third section,
Designing Culture, crosses disciplinary and geographic boundaries
with perspectives and methodologies for cross-cultural communication.
In Graphic Design in a Multicultural World, Katherine McCoy
captures the multicultural state of American society around the end of
the twentieth century. She analyzes the historical signicance and future
ramications of a heterogeneous marketthat which graphic designers
face today. In Encoding Advertisements, Matthew Soar uses theoretical
and empirical inquiry to investigate the microculture of designers in
advertising agencies who inuence societys cultural masses on a macro
level, using a cultural studies framework for his analysis. Shelley Evenson
follows with a useful user-centered research methodology she developed,
directed storytelling, that is inuenced by narrative and contextual
inquirymethods used in social science research. Evensons method
helps the designer to understand the audience without having to conduct
costly, long-term ethnographic research. John Jennings, in his essay
Dezyne Klass, comparatively analyzes design and Hip Hop cultures.
He posits that Hip Hop culture can inform the design of visual language
and details how in a pedagogical study. Jenningss discussion of how a
subculture can be co-opted by corporate culture is examined at a further
extreme in Peter Martins A Step Ahead of Praxis. Martin takes us
across the globe to the Middle East to ponder how design can help Qataris
salvage their cultural identity amidst globalization. Turkish design
researcher Seval Dgleroglu
Yavuz, in Mediating Messages, argues
thoughtfully about whether American advertising creates culture or
mirrors it. Finally, in Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams, Toni
OBryan and I converse about a project in which graphic artists in Cuba
along with graphic designers in the United States participated in a
computer-mediated collaboration to visually interpret the phrase
sharing dreams using their own cultural aesthetics.
human-centered design
The last section of Design Studies grapples with the impact of human
rights, behaviors, experiences, and tendencies on graphic design for the
sake of humanity. Richard Buchanan leads the section with a thoughtful
intellectual reection on human rights and design, inspired by his
observations while visiting Cape Town, South Africa. IDEO designers
Roshi Givechi, Ian Groulx, and Marc Woollard follow with a disclosure of
their multidisciplinary teams and human-centered methods that put the
people they design for rst in the design process. Microsoft designers
20 DESIGN STUDIES
John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin show how the development of research-
based ctional personas during the design process helps designers to
better understand human behavior, and by extension who they are
designing for. In Educating Design Citizens, Ann Tyler discusses how
her cultural experience as a martial artist inuenced her teaching
philosophy to instill in students social responsibility. Rounding out the
collection, Ann McDonald describes a design class in which students
collaboratively designed an advocacy project protesting the Patriot Act.
Design Studies concludes with a comprehensive list of bibliographic
resources in graphic designrelated topics such as cultural studies,
anthropology, architecture, communication, and social science.
conclusion
Can reasoning and intuition coexist harmoniously within graphic design?
The seed of research has been planted; will it ourish perennially or wilt
when the hype wears oK? We know there exists a growing interest in
the visual in interdisciplinary research, both from classical disciplines
like psychology, anthropology, and education as well as from cultural
studies, rhetoric, technical communication, human-computer interaction,
and science and technology studies. Although graphic designers have an
expertise in visual matters that is useful to interdisciplinary knowledge,
few can participate in interdisciplinary research, in part because of a
language barrier that exists. More would be able to do so if the vernacular
for graphic design broadens to include reasoning skills in addition to
intuitive ones. Graphic designers must learn to speak the language of
research. The objectives of this book then are to instill in graphic
designers a research-oriented practice that can be useful for any project;
to inspire them to adopt a design process that is more inclusive of
audience input and interdisciplinary expertise;21 and to encourage and
enable them to be members of multidisciplinary teams.
Design Studies agrms that graphic designers are producers of
interdisciplinary knowledge and not just visual translators of a clients
knowledge. Its theories and methods span many disciplines from
cognitive to social science, and the contributors are both seasoned and
emerging design scholars and practitioners. As a group they all care
about how culture inuences design decisions in order for the nal
design object or experience to inuence and shape society.
notes
1. There are many perspectives on what is proven theory. For instance, according to
the philosopher Karl Popper, no theory can be proven to be true; we can only
become increasingly condent as many experiments fail to falsify the theory. If
theories remain standing in the face of repeated experiments, they become a
law or principle, but even then they are always susceptible to critique. After
centuries of success, for example, Newtons physics fell to Einsteins. One process
of deriving a principle begins with the observation of a phenomenon. A hypothesis
is then oKered to explain the phenomenon. Next, an experiment is applied to test
the hypothesis. If the experiment does not result as predicted, a new hypothesis
is established. If the experiment does result as predicted, the hypothesis becomes
a theory. The theory is disseminated to the discipline via peer-review journals
and other refereed scholarly venues for replication by other researchers and
practitioners. If, when replicated by others, the experiment does not result as
predicted, the theory becomes controversy. However, if the replicated
experiments result as predicted, the theory eventually becomes a law or principle.
2. Marty Neumeier, Secrets of Design: Pagecraft, Critique 8 (Spring 1988): 1829,
and James Souttar, Seven Pillars of Design, Critique 8 (Spring 1988); 4047.
3. Paul Rand, Design, Form, and Chaos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 47.
4. See, for instance, Philip B. Meggs, Type & Image: The Language of Graphic Design
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992); Ellen Lupton and J. Abbot Miller, Design
Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996); Donis A. Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1973); Jorge Frascara, Communication Design: Principles, Methods, and
Practice (New York: Allworth Press, 2004); Matt Soar, Theory Is a Good Idea, in
Michael Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer 4: Critical Essays on Graphic Design (New
York: Allworth Press, 2002); and Ian Nobel and Russell Bestley, Visual Research: An
Introduction to Research Methodologies in Graphic Design (Switzerland: Ava
Publishing, 2005).
5. Rand, Design, Form, and Chaos, 45.
6. See William Addison Dwiggins, New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design, in
Michael Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design
(New York: Allworth Press, 1999); Meggs, Type & Image; and Bradbury Thompson,
The Art of Graphic Design, 1st ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
7. Michael Bierut, How to Become Famous, in D. K. Holland, ed., Design Issues: How
Graphic Design Informs Society (New York: Allworth Press, 2001).
8. Ross MacDonald and James Victore, Professional Practice: Modern Business Skills
for the Graphic Artist, in Steven Heller and Marie Finamore, eds., Design Culture:
An Anthology of Writing from the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (New York:
Allworth Press, 1997).
9. See http://designarchives.aiga.org.
10. See Michael Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
(New York: Allworth Press, 1994); Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer 2: Critical
22 DESIGN STUDIES
Writings on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 1997); Bierut, et al., eds.,
Looking Closer 3; and Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer 4.
11. Jonathan Barnbrook et al., First Things First Manifesto 2000, AIGA Journal of
Graphic Design 17, no. 2 (1999); Michael Bierut, A Manifesto with Ten Footnotes,
I.D. 47, no. 2 (March/April 2000).
12. Bierut, et al., Looking Closer 4; Steven Heller and Vronique Vienne, eds., Citizen
Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility (New York: Allworth Press, 2003).
13. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Some Aspects of Design from the Perspective of a
Woman Designer, Icographic 6 (Croydon, England: 1973).
14. See Katherine McCoy, Graphic Design in a Multicultural World, in this collection.
15. Jorge Frascara, A History of Design, a History of Concerns, in Steven Heller and
Georgette Balance, eds., Graphic Design History (New York: Allworth Press, 2001).
16. For a discussion of collaborative designing with the audience, see Paul Nini, A
Manifesto of Inclusivism, in Bierut, et al., eds., Looking Closer 4. For a discussion
of audience research methods, see Todd Cherkasky, et al., eds., Designing Digital
Environments: Bringing in More Voices: Proceedings of the Participatory Design
Conference, November 2000, CUNY (New York: CPSR, 2000), and Stephen A. R.
Scrivener, et al., eds., Collaborative Design: Proceedings of CoDesigning 2000
(London: Springer-Verlag, 2000).
17. Richard Buchanan, Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument and Demonstration
in Design Practice in Victor Marjolin, ed., Design Discourse: History Theory
Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 92.
18. See Scrivener, et al., Collaborative Design; Doug Schuler and Aki Namioka,
Participatory Design: Principles and Practice (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1993); Jorge Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design: Mass
Communications and Social Change (Bristol: Taylor & Francis, 1997); Hugh Beyer
and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design: Dening Customer-Centered Systems (San
Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998); Richard Buchanan, Human Dignity and
Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design, in this
collection; and Brenda Laurel, ed., Design Research: Methods and Perspectives
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
19. See Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
(Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003).
20. See Scrivener, et al., eds., Collaborative Design.
21. See Nini, A Manifesto of Inclusion, and in John Clarkson, et al., Inclusive Design:
Design for the Whole Population (London: Springer-Verlag, 2003).
Section I
V I S I O N A RY P E R S P E C T I V E S
chapter 1
Graphic Design:
Fine Art or Social Science?
JORGE FRASCARA
toward a theoretical backbone for graphic design

Graphic design has existed long enough for its role in society to be easily
understood. However, unlike architecture, literature, or the ne arts, it
has developed without much theoretical reection. It has evolved into a
sophisticated practice in a piecemeal fashion, with scattered eKorts aimed
at the development of subareas, such as posters or books, but without either
the critical apparatus in literature or the dialogue present in architecture.
One aspect of graphic design that has attracted some discussion is
visual style. But this discussion of style has several aws:
it overemphasizes the importance of the visual structure
within an aesthetic context;
it omits problems of appropriateness;
it leaves out certain areas of graphic design, such as signage,
forms, timetables, maps, and educational material;
it omits the importance of ideas in the communication
process, not distinguishing between visual creation and
visual manipulation;
it avoids problems of performance related to visual perception;
it omits problems related to the impact that graphic
communication has on the publics attitudes and ideas.
26
These aws have led to several distortions, the most signicant
brought about by the praise of modern avant-garde typography. How
long will the praise of El Lissitzky continue? True, he made a strong
impact on a few typographic designers whose work in graphic design
was closely related to the practice of art and looked very similar to their
paintings or those of avant-garde artists of the time. But was Lissitzkys
contribution really positive? His visual language was tremendously
abstract, as inappropriate to mass communication as Kurt Schwitters
graphics for Pelikan ink were inappropriate for the product. Pelikan ink,
used for line drawing and calligraphy, was presented surrounded by
geometric typography, black and red bars, and rectangles. Not only did
that imagery not express the product, but it did not even relate to the
logo or the label.
Lissitzky was interested in improving communication, as his writing
shows. He and other avant garde artists made a major impact on the
visual development of graphic design, but they also raised the importance
of their aesthetic approach to a point where the communication link
with the public they were addressing broke down. They seem not to have
been aware that communication requires the sharing of codes. Although
designers need not rely totally on stereotypes, they cannot disregard the
codes of the public; they should work with the public and improve its
visual and conceptual language as much as possible, without breaking
the communication link.
Lissitzky worked on a wide range of projects, some of them arguably
less ashy and more useful than others, but the Lissitzky worshipped by
many contemporary designers and design historians is the person who
produced the quasi-abstract, constructivist, red and black pieces.
Although the quality of Lissitzkys, Schwitters, and Theo van
Doesburgs designs in their own exhibitions, ideas, and publications can
be praised, the fact that they failed to realize that their visual language
was not appropriate in all possible cases must be acknowledged. The
same is applicable to other artists who did some graphic design. Joan Mir,
for instance, was perfectly skillful in the promotion of his own exhibition,
whereas Josef Albers design for a Lincoln Center Film Festival says a lot
about Albers and little, if anything, about a lm festival.
The excessive importance given to the avant-garde movement in
the context of graphic design history is based on the failure of theory to
27
recognize graphic design as something other than an art form.
Furthermore, as an art form, graphic design is viewed only from an
aesthetic perspective, without enough consideration for communication
and social signicance. Surely aesthetics is important, but is by no means
the sole measure for quality.
Discussion should start with a working denition: graphic design is
the activity that organizes visual communication in society. It is concerned
with the egciency of communication, the technology used for its
implementation, and the social impact it eKectsin other words, its
social responsibility. The need for communicative egciency is a response
to the main reason for the existence of any piece of graphic design:
someone has something to communicate to someone else. This involves,
to a greater or lesser extent, a perceptual and a behavioral concern. The
perceptual concern involves visual detection problems sometimes and
communication problems all the time. Problems of detection and
communication include visibility, legibility, and aesthetics. The behavioral
concern has to do with the way graphic communications aKect the
attitudes and behavior of their audiences. Advertising design is expected
to make people buy products or services; political or ideological
propaganda is expected to aKect peoples beliefs and actions; regulatory
signs on highways are intended to organize the ow of tragc; teaching
aids are supposed to improve learning performance; bank notes are
designed to make forgery digcult and identication of one denomination
from another easy. This is the real measure of the performance of any and
every piece of graphic design and the proof that graphic design cannot
be understood in isolation but only within a communication context.
Social responsibility in graphic design is the concern for the following:
the impact that all visual communication has in the community
and the way in which its content inuences people;
the impact that all visual communication has in the visual
environment;
the need to ensure that communications related to the safety of
the community are properly implemented.
This brief summary shows that the practice of graphic design transcends
the realm of aesthetics. Pursuing the identication of the pioneers of
graphic design in this context and seeing in what way Lissitzky compares
to Edward Johnston or to Jan Tschichold is therefore worthwhile.
28 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

Interesting results might also be derived from comparisons between
the contributions of Armin Hofmann and Giovanni Pintori when the
focus of attention moves from a specic aesthetic conception to
communication egciency. Although Hofmann created a beautiful style,
Pintori had a greater exibility, a better understanding of the importance
of appropriateness, and created a feeling for Olivetti that still exists
after more than thirty years.
Although the concepts of communication and technological
egciency are common denominators for all areas of graphic design,
several internal diKerences, depending on the subarea, need developing.
The things graphic designers should know to promote the sale of cookies
are very diKerent from those they need to know to teach a ve-year-old
how to read. Every time a graphic designer really wishes to achieve the
objectives of the proposed communication, the cross-disciplinary nature
of the profession becomes apparent.
Graphic designers are always in need of active dialogue with their
clients and with other professionalsbe it with an editor, a manager, a
marketing expert, or an educatorto really make the best of their practice.
This certainly has important implications in relation to the evaluation of
graphic design quality and to the education of graphic designers.
the problem of qualit y in graphic design

Further to the working denition of graphic design advanced above, a
denition for quality in graphic design is also necessary: quality in
graphic design is measured by the changes it produces in the audience. The
movement away from aesthetics and stylistic innovation as determinants
of quality started in the early 1950s, when investigations related to
perceptual psychology, particularly the Gestalt school, provided some
theoretical concepts for visual fundamentals courses in art schools.
These concepts replaced intuitive rules for what was called composition.
This involved a rationalization of part of the design process and was
parallel to developments in the study of legibility, which itself was the
expression of an interest that went beyond the aesthetic structure of the
visual eld, stepping into a concern for communication egciency.
This concern represented a new factor in the measurement of quality
in design. The 1950s and 1960s saw a growing interest in communication
throughout the eld. The works of Paul Rand and Josef Mller-Brockmann
FRASCARA: GRAPHIC DESIGN 29

fig. 1 Josef Mller-Brockmann, poster for a campaign against noise pollution. The
design uses strength of form as a vehicle for communication.
are two diKerent expressions of this concern (fig . 1 ). Research developed

by the United States armed forces since World War II on the labeling of
equipment, instruction strategies, and information panels introduced a
concern for communication egciency simultaneous to the development
of information theory, communication theory, and semiotics. Signs
became signage systems and logos became corporate identities.
Buildings, fashion, and lifestyles started to be analyzed in communication
terms. The receivers of graphic design messages were subsequently
discovered as an active part of the communication process. Initially,
however, these receivers were perceived basically as decoders.
The objective of graphic designers was to produce clear
communications. Only designers in the advertising business were
concerned with other elements in the performance of their designs
namely, sales. At least as far back as the 1950s, it became clear that
clients accounts depended on clients success and that advertising
design was a contributing factor to the success of a business. The
concern for sales and persuasion in the advertising eld led to the
constitution of multidisciplinary teams of managers, writers, sociologists,
psychologists, and designers who contributed to the establishment of
marketing as an indispensable component of the advertising eld.
Although understanding the importance of changes in public

attitudes as a consequence of design has so far been limited to
advertising, a closer look at the whole eld of graphic design might
suggest that specic changes in attitudes and behavior are, indeed, the
nal aim of graphic design in most areas. It has been said many times
that the designer is a problem solver of visual communications and of a
clients needs. But the solution to a clients needs is not the production of
the visual communication; it is the modication of peoples attitudes or
abilities in one way or another. This modication can be a change, as in
switching from one product to another or in quitting smoking; a
reinforcement, as in the case of exercising more, giving more money to
charities, or drinking more milk; or a facilitation, as in the case of
reducing the complexity of reading, operating a machine, or orienting
oneself in a new place.
The quality of the designs produced in relation to the above
examples will be determined by the number of people who switch to the
desired product, who quit smoking, and so forth. Clarity and beauty do
not necessarily determine objective achievement, although they usually
contribute to success. If graphic designers wish to be recognized as
problem solvers, it is indispensable that they concern themselves with
the results of their work measured by achievement of the objectives that
generated the need for the production of the visual communication in
question. Aesthetic appropriateness and quality are, of course, certainly
of high importance, both as factors that aKect performance and as
responsibilities designers have to the community. But the concept of
quality should be placed in context in relation to the larger design goals.
The aesthetic quality of a design does not determine its overall quality.
This thesis has wide implications both in terms of professional
practice and of design education. In the professional realm, specialists
other than graphic designers are required to interpret public responses,
to evaluate design performance, and to advise regarding appropriate
modication of the communication strategies when better results are
desired. The experts required for this task may vary from one professional
area to another, but in general they should presumably come from the
elds of marketing, sociology, psychology, and educationdisciplines
whose main concerns are the behavior of individuals and groups, and the
problems of interpreting, quantifying, and qualifying information, as well
as to a greater or a lesser extent, applying the information to practical ends.

The implications for graphic design education are just as obvious:
the traditional art school cannot provide a full answer. Obviously, the
thesis here contends that the designers job is not nished when the
design is produced and delivered, but that evaluation must be an integral
part of the design process. In a safety symbols project, for example, the
design problem is not the production of symbols but the development of
an eKective communication strategy for the prevention of accidents. It is
not enough for the symbols to be beautiful, clear, and visible; these are
useful factors, but the real measure of the quality of the design lies in its
contribution to the reduction of accidents.
At best, these considerations will make the evaluation of design
quality clearer and will better equip designers to contribute more
egciently to the solution of clients problems. And not just communication
problems, because as already indicated, the nal objective of every
communication design is some kind of behavioral change in a target
population that occurs after the communication has taken place.
the education of graphic designers

A basic duality of graphic design becomes apparent when the formation
of practitioners is considered: what skills do they need to develop?
Graphic design is both a rational and an artistic activity. The decision-
making process in graphic design alternates between the consideration
of objective information and intuitive leaps. The goal of practitioners
should be to base their decisions as much as possible on objective
information, but the nature of the eld always requires a certain degree
of artistic intuitionthat is, of decisions made by designers on the basis
of experience that is digcult to quantify or explain rationally. Graphic
design in this case is comparable to marketing or psychoanalysis. All are
activities in which a body of knowledge has to be applied to specic
situations that relate to human behavior.
The balance between artistic and rational elements in the practice of
graphic design poses an interesting challenge to design educators, one that
calls for the development of visual sophistication and intuitive abilities
to express concepts visually along with a rational capacity for processes
of analysis and synthesis. In addition, graphic designers need skills to
listen to and interpret the needs of people in other elds and enough
exibility of mind and resources to produce egcient communications.

No school could attempt to deal with all of these requirements in
every area of professional practice. Advertising, information, illustration,
editorial, signage, and education design are areas that demand diKerent
backgrounds, training, and aptitudes, and require both specialized
instructors and motivated students for each. Reducing the scope of a
program to include only some of the professional areas would be
admissible. One school might choose not to deal with three-dimensional
design such as packaging, signage, and exhibitions, while another might
concentrate on advertising, which might be excluded by still another.
Whereas making the above choices would be desirable, removing any of
the concerns that should be present in all graphic design work would not
be advisable. The teaching should represent all levels of the activitythe
emotional and the rational, the communicative, the technological, and
the awareness of the social context.
In most cases, emphasis has been placed on the visual aspect in
education. There has also been a focus on education as a process of
transmission of information and the development of personal skills and
style. This trend has led to a reduction of the concerns appropriate to
graphic design. In this context, an important distinction can be made
between undergraduate and graduate education in graphic design.
Undergraduate education must be centered on developing individual
students skills; graduate education should do the same at a higher and
more conceptual level, while also contributing to the advancement of
knowledge in the eld.
Research and advancement of knowledge in graphic design require
the support of senior educational institutions. Professional practice does
not usually allow for research time, and when research is developed,
practitioners do not share information with others. Market research in
advertising is very common, but it is case-specic and digcult to apply
to diKerent situations. Perception psychologists develop basic and
applied research of wider application, but many times psychological
research is so removed from reality that placing its results in applied
contexts requires additional research eKorts.
Certainly universities should not directly serve industry, but those
schools interested in the advancement of knowledge cannot expect
inquiries from industry other than those connected to its immediate
benet. It therefore follows that visual communication problems that relate

to noncommercial human needs have only the university as a resource
for developing solutions. There is a need to work on several fronts:
reference centers where existing information can be stored
and retrieved should be developed;
more information should be generated through two kinds of
research activities: experimentation, and critical discussion
of both past and present work;
communication networks should be developed among
researchers, leading at best to coordinating eKorts, and at
worst to avoiding duplication.
Graduate programs in graphic design should either work along the
preceding lines or generate design solutions for specic projects that
clearly surpass the usual level of quality in the professional eld and that
become models of excellence for practicing graphic design. This practical
work, however, should be developed hand in hand with a sound,
theoretical analysis of design solutions.
Although due regard should be paid to visual sophistication, and
although design solutions cannot be based solely on the rational
organization of objective information, the profession needs to move away
from being a purely artistic endeavor toward becoming one in which visual
solutions are based as much as possible on explicable decision processes.
In order to direct graduate graphic design studies toward the
development of new knowledge, educators should conceive them as
qualitatively diKerent from undergraduate studies and not as mere
continuation, whatever the increased degree of complexity and ambition
might be. In undergraduate studies, the teachers instruct and create
learning situations that help students make discoveries and develop
their skills, but those discoveries and that development do not necessarily
expand either the knowledge of the instructors or the advancement of
the profession as a whole. Students can make new, surprising, and
exciting syntheses, and teaching at the undergraduate level is therefore
not necessarily repetitious, but the central task is the learning process of
the students who require some years before they can make signicant
contributions to the profession. Nevertheless, undergraduate studies
should not be seen as a mere preparation for integration into industry;
in other words, undergraduate studies should not be merely job training,
nor is it possible to believe that four years is all that is needed for a

professional education. Undergraduate programs should aim at graduating
persons who are ready to begin a professional career and whose conceptual
preparation will allow them to progress rapidly and to enrich the
practice of the profession.
Developing an awareness of the essential problems of graphic design
in undergraduates is important. Graphic design is rst and foremost
human communication. A graphic designer is a person who constructs a
pattern in order to organize the communication link between the piece
of design and the viewer. In most cases, graphic designs are meant to be
seen or read. These activities happen in time as well as in space.
Although designers work in two dimensions or in sequences of two-
dimensional pieces for the most part, the enactment of these pieces
occurs over time. As with the playwright or the composer, the designer
produces a piece (play, score) that comes into full existence only when
the communication with the audience takes place.
My emphasis on this aspect shifts the designers center of attention
from the interrelation of visual components to that between the
audience and the design, recognizing the receiver as active participant
in the construction of the message. It follows that decisions relating to
visual aspects of the design should be based not only on compositional
concerns, but also, and chiey, on the study of human communication.
This emphasis on the receiver, within the conventional scheme of
transmitter-receiver opposition, places visual communication design
opposite to the romantic conception of art as self-expression, thus
avoiding one of the distorting conceptions of the profession.
Given the above, the time has come to understand that the
education of designers cannot be satised by the resources of traditional
art schools, and that several branches of psychology, verbal communication,
sociology, computing science, marketing, and other disciplines should be
called upon to develop in students the required awareness. This seems
to be the only choice if a theoretical understanding of graphic design is
to develop and if the eld is to take on the responsibility for the
conception and production of eKective and conscientious communications
and for the education of graphic designers. This specic operational
dimension must be qualied by a concern for professional and social
responsibility that includes ethics and aesthetics.
First published in Design Issues 5, no. 1 (Fall 1988).

chapter 2
Shaping Belief:
The Role of Audience in
Visual Communication
ANN C. T YLER
As the goal of all communication is to induce in the audience some

belief about the past . . . , the present . . . , or the future,1 audience
considerations are integral components of the process of visual
communication. During that process, the designer attempts to persuade
the audience to adopt a belief demonstrated or suggested through
the two-dimensional object. The purpose of this persuasion is to
accomplish one of the following goals: to induce the audience to take
some action; to educate the audience (persuade them to accept
information or data); or to provide the audience with an experience of
the display or exhibition of a value for approval or disapproval, with
which an audience may wish to identify or reject. An exploration of the
relationship between audience and communication goals will reveal how
belief is shaped through design.
The relationship of the audience to the communication process
is viewed in widely diKerent ways. From one perspective, the object is
seen as an isolated formal aesthetic expression, with the audience
consequently regarded as a spectator. For example, within design
competitions, exhibitions, and publications, objects are often displayed
with little or no commentary, with no discussion of the communication
goals. This presentation of design emphasizes the aesthetic sensibility of
36
the individual designer and severs the object from its relationship with
the intended audience.2
Another view characterizes the audience as a passive reader in the
communication process. The audience decodes or interprets a visual
statement but is not an active participant in the formation of meaning.
This view is evident in Hanno Ehsess Representing Macbeth: A Case
Study in Visual Rhetoric,3 in which the designer combines a variety of
formal devices to construct diKerent messages, and the audience then
interprets those messages. Ehsess analysis is a grammatical model
because it treats design as the construction of statements or visual
sentences; linguistic and pictorial content are joined like parts of speech
to form the message. Classications of speech, such as antithesis,
metaphor, and metonymy, provide designers with a structure for
generating a range of messages.4 The designer begins with the subject
and then explores concepts or themes by applying the grammatical
model to the subject. In this model, the message is examined in relation
to the original subject and is clear or unclear, successful or unsuccessful.
The audience either understands the message, nds it confusing (the
message is not a true or correct interpretation of the subject), or
nds it unintelligible. The audience is viewed as involved in no deeper
engagement than that of decoding references to the subject. A
grammatical approach thus emphasizes the scientic over the aesthetic
aspects of design. In addition, since the audience brings nothing
particular to the process, it is not particularized in any way; it is both a
nonspecic and a passive audience.
Semiotics, a third and closely related view, recognizes the specicity
of the audience. An audience holds or recognizes certain beliefs and
reads messages based on these beliefs. In Roland Barthess Rhetoric of
the Image, denotation and connotation distinguish the literal and
symbolic messages within visual communication.5 The audience reads
the literal message while also interpreting the signs that express the
iconic message.6 The potential readings of these signs outside the
communication device are multiple, but the interpretations are
particularized within the design through their combination with other
signs and the denoted messages.7 The audience, with its cultural beliefs
and understanding, is also involved in particularizing the symbolic
(connoted) message, thereby becoming an active reader.8
37
Yet another view, to be explored in depth here, is a rhetorical
analysis of design.9 Within a theory of rhetoric, the audience is not
characterized as a reader but as a dynamic participant in argument. In
this rhetorical view, visual communication attempts to persuade a
specic audience through argument, as opposed to making a statement
within a grammatical structure or conveying a message within the
dynamics of semiotics. Designers utilize existing beliefs to induce new
beliefs in the audience. It is the use of existing beliefs, as much as the
attempt to induce new ones, that contributes to maintaining, questioning,
or transforming social values through argument. Designers persuade an
audience by referencing established or accepted values and attributing
those values to the new subject.10 The specic audiences experiences
within society and its understanding of social attitudes are an essential
aspect of argument and necessary to the communication goal.
The selection of examples of design within this essay, though not
comprehensive, shows the use of devices and strategies to construct an
argument, the use of existing beliefs in argument as a strategy to induce
new beliefs, and the role of the audience in accomplishing communication
goals. The formal devices in each example are discussed in terms of
the primary goal of the design: to induce action, to educate, to create
an experience.
persuading the audience to ac t

Persuading an audience to attend an exhibit, travel to another country,
or invest in a company is inducing that audience to take an action. In an
attempt to persuade, the designer develops an argument within the
two-dimensional space that denes and represents an audiences future
experience. The argument becomes a promise: if one attends A, one will
feel B; if one goes to C, one will see D; if one uses E, one will become F.
The goal of the rst example is to persuade the audience to visit the
New York Aquarium (fig. 1 ). The posters argument, made through
formal devices, denes the audiences future experience at the aquarium:
if you go, you will have an emotional experience based on a friendly,
intimate relationship with members of the animal kingdom. Intimacy
between audience and mammal is created through scale. The mammal
takes up most of the space, creating the impression that it is close to the
viewer. Personal contact is also suggested because the mammal appears

fig. 1 New York Aquarium poster, 1974. Designed by Michael Bosniak and Howard
York; photography by Russ Kinne
to make eye contact with the audience. Standing in such close proximity
to a large animal could be frightening rather than intimate, but any
feeling of confrontation is avoided through the dreamy, soft quality of
the image, the prole position of the mammal (it is not coming directly
toward the viewer), and the friendly expression on its face.
The formal devices suggest the nature of the aquarium experience
by referencing and reinforcing beliefs regarding the relationship between
individuals and naturei.e., nature is friendly toward human beings,
and animals enjoy being the object of our attention. Although the word
aquarium indicates connement, the image denes it as vast, showing
no cage or boundaries.
While the aquarium poster promises the audience an experience
based on an emotional relationship with the subject, the PanAm travel
posters oKer a future experience predicated on distance and observation
(figs. 2 and 3 ). The communication goal is to persuade the audience to
travel to Bali or Japan. The posters argue that the audience will have an
aesthetic experience in these countries. The poster for Bali is a rural scene
of a terraced agricultural area, while that for Japan features a sunset
and two gures in traditional clothing. Like the aquarium advertisement,
both travel posters use monumental imagery, but the large scale used
TYLER: SHAPING BELIEF 39

figs. 2 and 3 PanAm travel posters for Bali and Japan, 1972. Designed by Ivan ChermayeK,
Thomas Geismar, and Bruce Blackburn
here, combined with other formal devices, makes a very diKerent

argument. The PanAm images are architectural in nature: the terraced
land forms a contrasting gure/ground pattern; the two people standing
with their backs to the audience become shapes against the sky. People
and land become objects of beauty. Distanced from the scene through
perspective and the lack of any reference back to the viewer, the audience
thus remains outside a beautiful, tranquil scene. Landscape and people
are frozen in time for the audience to view as they chooseas in a
museum of artifacts. Both posters promise the audience an aesthetic,
non-participatory experience if they travel to these distant lands.
The PanAm posters have transformed these foreign countries and
people into art, referencing a paradigm that says art is to be observed,
not experienced. They reinforce a belief that these cultures are static
and removed from the audiences own experiences. This is achieved
through formal devices that create the appearance of a non-participatory
audience relationship. The audience is placed in the role of the observer,
yet they do participate by bringing cultural beliefs about beauty and art
to the encounter.
The nal example of design that persuades an audience to act is an
annual report. The primary communication goal of annual reports is to

convince the viewer either to invest or to maintain their investment in a
company. Designers persuade the audience by making an argument that
represents the companys philosophy, achievements, and nancial solidity.
The argument is often made through the companys employees or the
people using their services; in this way, the audience attributes the
values embodied in these individuals with the institution they represent.
The Caremark Inc. 1985 Annual Report makes its argument
through Dominick Petone, an individual beneting from the companys
services (fig. 4 ). The design argues that Mr. Petone, and therefore
Caremark, has strong, moral values; he is hardworking, trustworthy, and
straightforward. The dominant image is a photograph of a hardworking
man in working-class clothing with his tools in the background. The
audience knows he is hardworking because he is wearing a T-shirt, is
slim, and appears to be serious in the workplace. The written text states
that though ill, Mr. Petone continues to work. From this information we
can gather that work and self-sugciency are important to him. He is also
a rugged individualist: the lighting highlights and accentuates his facial
features. He is portrayed as a role model, a hero. The portrait is isolated
on the page as in an art catalogue; the borders around the photograph
are the same proportions as in traditional art matting, while the small
serifed type of the text reinforces the serious and classical image. Yet
Dominick Petone is approachable: he makes direct eye contact with the
fig. 4 Caremark, Inc. 1985 Annual Report. Designed by Jim Berte, Robert Miles Runyan
& Assoc.

audience, his gaze is open, not aggressive, and he gives the audience a
Mona Lisa smile.
Although Mr. Petone is separated from the investor audience by his
economic class, the audience nonetheless identies with him through
the shared moral values of responsibility, honesty, and stability. These
values are also intended to represent the institution and are shared by
the image (Mr. Petone), the producer (Caremark), and the audience
(investors). The beliefs represented by Dominick Petone are values that
bind the culture, values that the audience recognizes and then attributes
to Caremark.
educating the audience

The second communication goal is to educate the audience or to persuade
them to accept and interpret information. All communication involves an
interpretation of information,11 one based on data, perspective, analysis,
and judgment, even if that information is viewed as valueless, as not
reecting a particular belief system. Educational materials are no exception;
information is interpreted and communicated according to the paradigms
of academic communities. Educating the audience often includes making
an argument that the information is fact, that it is true.
The map and guide to the Congaree Swamp is intended to educate
the audience about the swamps ecosystem (fig. 5 ). The argument
suggests that nature has an inherent logical order and that the information
provided is scientici.e., rational and factual. For information to appear
factual, it must seem stable, unchangeable. Various formal devices such
as detailed illustration techniques, minor changes in scale, and lack of
tension in margin and spacing mitigate against an emotive response by
the audience, while a heightened sense of order is achieved through the
clearly visible organizational grid system. The brochure is basically a
diagramcodied information without expressive characteristics that
might suggest individual authorship. Information is presented as data
and appears to be communicated through an omniscient voice. When
the all-knowing voice of science is used, the audience seems to be non-
participatorythey are, apparently, only readers. This dynamic is similar
to that of the PanAm posters, but here the image lacks a sense of drama
or emotion, eliminating the appearance of interpretation or perspective.
In sum, the organization of facts in the Congaree Swamp brochure is an

fig. 5 Congaree Swamp brochure. Designed by Bruce Geyman
argument relying on a scientic paradigm. While learning about the

swamps ecosystem, the audiences belief in the rational order of the
universe is also reinforced.
The goal of educating an audience also occurs within communication
from the business community and through objects not generally
classied as educational materials. Corporate and institutional logos are
an example of design that attempts to educate (in addition to, in some
cases, inducing the audience to buy a product). The logo denes the
company and persuades the audience that the qualities of the logo are
also those of the institution it represents. The audience includes both
the company employees and those who come in contact with the
company. Audience identication with the values of the organization
serves the goals of management as well as those of public relations.
Simplied, geometric logos became the symbols of large corporations
and dominated design in the 1960s and 1970s. These reductive icons
were developed to represent the modern corporation as a large,
anonymous entity driven by technology and the values attributed to
sciencerationality and objectivity. The icons reference science through
formal devices such as diagrammatic imagery, an egcient use of line
and shape, and an emphasis on positive and negative space (figs. 68 ).
As in the swamp brochure, the elimination of individuality and emotion
suggests an omniscient voice and the presentation of fact. Geometric
simplication of form continues to be applied to logos, but the 1980s
also saw the reintroduction of more formally complex shapes and

Left: fig. 6 Angeles Corporation logo. Designed by Robert Miles Runyan, Robert Miles
Runyan & Assoc. Center: fig. 7 Screen Gems Inc. logo. Designed by Tom Geismar,
ChermayeK and Geismar Right: fig. 8 Seatrain Lines Inc. logo. Designed by Tom
Geismar, ChermayeK and Geismar
nave representation. Icons began to take on some of the qualities of

folk art imagery by referencing individual (handmade) characteristics.
These new logos reect the same communication goal: educating the
audience by dening the organization (figs. 9 and 10 ). Rather than
referring to the values associated with science and thereby distancing
the audience, these logos communicate a more emotional relationship.
Their quotidian quality represents the company not as an anonymous
institution but rather as an organization comprised of individuals like the
audience. The audiences relationship to the organization is based on
self-identication. Though not overtly participatory, an argument
involving personal identication recognizes the audiences existence.
In the previous examples, existing beliefs are transferred to the
subject to create new beliefs. In posters within an exhibition titled Visual
Perceptions, existing beliefs are replaced with new beliefs. The goal of
the posters is to educate the audience regarding the stereotyping of
African Americans within the print and broadcast media.12 Several posters
in the exhibition invoke stereotypical images and racist values and then
refute those beliefs within the argument. Beliefs are not only a strategy
of argument but the subject of the posters as well, and so must be clearly
Left: fig. 9 Blackdog logo. Designed by Mark Fox, Blackdog

Right: fig. 10 Chiasso logo. Designed by JeK Barnes.

visible to the audience. Triptych, a series of three posters by Greg Grey,
alters the audiences relationship with and interpretation of the
information over time. The rst interpretation is ambiguous and may
lead to a stereotypical conclusion, while the information received later
exposes that stereotype. For example, in the last poster of the series, the
audience rst sees a blurred gure of an African American man running,
juxtaposed with the headline CRIME (fig. 11 ). The photograph
suggests anonymity through cropping, motion, and soft focus; this is a
man portrayed without individual characteristics. The large type screams
like a tabloid headline and a label. Both the image and headline are
ambiguous in meaning. Did the man commit a crime? Was a crime
committed against him? The audience can only read the small type after
coming closer to the poster, after the opportunity to form a stereotype
has presented itself. The small type, contrasting in size and detail,
shifts the ambiguity and tells the audience how to interpret the poster.
. . . Seeing my color makes me a criminal. But what is my crime?
Through the text the man must now be seen as an individual trapped
within the context of racial stereotyping. By making the audience aware
of their participation in the argument, the poster challenges the audience
to recognize and confront their own beliefs and assumptions as well as
fig. 11 Triptych. Designed by Greg Grey

those of the media. The formal devices that divide the audiences
interaction into two clearly dened segments are merely expressions of
a deeper engagement by the audience. Through this device, it is revealed
that the audience holds or understands the beliefs demonstrated in the
argument and that the audience is attributing those beliefs to the subject.
providing the audience with an experience

through the display of values
Though all design creates some type of experience for the audience,
experience is rarely the primary communication goal. If the goal of a
design is experiential, then it is often interpreted as a focus on the
aesthetic moment.13 But experience is a display of values, and aesthetics
is simply one of any number of values. When an experience is the goal of
an argument, the design displays or exhibits particular values for the
audience to consider. The audience may identify with the values or they
may condemn or reject them.
A display of aesthetic values can be seen in Typography as
Discourse, a poster directed toward an audience of designers (fig. 12 ).
Formal devices in the poster raise issues of the role of aesthetics in
fig. 12 Typography as Discourse poster. Designed by Allen Hori; design directed by

Katherine McCoy; The 100 Show; the twelfth annual of the American Center for Design

typography and design. Because words are broken, displayed backwards,
and read in diKerent directions, the audience experiences the letters as
shapes, patterns, and codes. Type becomes a symbol not of language but
of an aesthetic. Adherence to an aesthetic is a cultural belief, and in
creating an experience for the audience, this poster develops an argument
for a certain aesthetic, a specic cultural belief.
Experiencing social beliefs as a primary goal is demonstrated in the
controversial series of ads produced by the clothing manufacturer
Benneton in the 1980s and 90s. The ads reproduce documentary
photographs that reference values. Used in an advertisement bearing
the name of Benetton, these images are used ambiguously without any
explanatory or contextualizing text. The ads, which have included
images of a death-bed scene of an AIDS patient, an overcrowded ship of
Albanian refugees headed to Italy, and a newborn infant with umbilical
cord and covered in blood and mucus, create an experience for the
audience through displays of social values (fig. 13 ).14
It could be argued that the goal of these ads is to induce action,
to induce the audience to buy clothing. In fact, the ads may result in an
audience remembering Benetton and supporting the company if the
audience identies with the values the ads seem to imply. Or it may be
argued that the goal of these ads is to educate, to induce in the audience
fig. 13 Benetton advertisement; photo: Oliviero Toscani for Benetton

an awareness of the issues and values referenced. But the ads do not
interpret the beliefs referenced, so the argument does not attempt to
persuade the audience of a particular belief. And so no particular belief
is attributed to Benetton either to induce an action or to educate. The
argument of these ads is a display of beliefs and the role of the audience
within that argument is to experience those beliefs.
The formal devices within the Benetton ads dene the audiences
role and also suggest the audiences deeper engagement with the
communication process. The quality of the photographs expresses their
documentary origins. Some of the photographs have the harsh
graininess of an enlarged snapshot, some express the immediacy of a
captured moment, and all place the viewer as a voyeur in a private,
emotional, or intimate scene. Audiences have become accustomed to
this voyeuristic role in the context of the news media. By altering the
context and placing the image where the audience expects to see a
product, the audience becomes uncomfortably aware of its role as an
active participant in the argument.
shaping belief
The goal of visual communication is to persuade an audience to adopt a
new belief. However, this necessitates a reference to existing beliefs
through formal devices. In developing an argument, a designer does not
have a choice of referencing or not referencing beliefs; the choice lies
in what beliefs are referenced. In making this choice, existing beliefs will
be aKected (maintained, rejected, or transformed), and a new belief
will be shaped. The designer, of course, cannot combine just any set of
beliefs with a subject to reach the communication goal. Communication
is directed toward a specic audience and that audience comes to the
argument with particular cultural beliefs and understanding.
The range of argument achieved by varying the combination of
formal devices seems limitless, and experimenting with formal devices
within argument has been a major focus in graphic design. By examining
the shaping of belief and the role of the audience in argument through a
theory of rhetoric, what are some additional directions for investigation
in design? Currently, there are many discussions concerning the
responsibility of the designer in relation to the subject. What of the
designers responsibilities in referencing beliefs? And as an active

participant in shaping belief, does the audience have a responsibility
within the communication process? Are there avenues for exploring
argument other than varying formal devices or varying the beliefs
referenced? Are there communication goals not yet explored through
visual communication? Questions of this sort may set a much needed
new agenda for design inquiry.
First published in Design Issues 9, no. 1 (Fall 1992).

notes
1. Richard Buchanan, Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and

Demonstration in Design Practice, in Victor Margolin, ed., Design Discourse:
History Theory Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 92.
2. Ibid., 91.
3. Hanno H. J. Ehses, Representing Macbeth: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, in
Margolin, ed., Design Discourse, 18797.
4. Ibid., 189.
5. Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, in Robert E. Innis, ed., Semiotics: An
Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 192205.
6. Ibid., 195.
7. Ibid., 199201.
8. Ibid., 20103.
9. In addition to Richard Buchanans Declaration by Design, see also Buchanan,
Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 1112.
A useful starting point for understanding the rhetorical approach in general is
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetorical Stance, in Now Dont Try to Reason with Me:
Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1970), 2533. For a discussion of the relationship between grammar and rhetoric
see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 319.
10. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising,
4th ed. (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1983), 5066.
11. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), 195.
12. Tibor Kalman, I Dont Think of You as Black, International Design 18, no. 2
(March/April 1991): 5659.
13. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958).
14. Ingrid Sischy, Advertising Taboos: Talking to Luciano Benetton and Oliviero
Toscani, Interview (April 1992): 6871.

chapter 3
From Formalism to
Social Signicance in
Communication Design
JODI FORLIZZI AND CHERIE LEBBON
introduc tion
Historically, graphic and advertising design, elds within communication
design, have oriented around clients and deliverables and have
maintained a focus on translating written or spoken messages into visual
communication. Designers of visual communicationsgraphic design
and the related areas of advertising, including brand and identities,
websites, and posters and photomontageshave largely relied on their
intuition and training to create appropriate visual messages. However,
communication designers have begun to encounter a more digcult task
in negotiating a clients vision and a viewers response to a designed
message. This is partly due to the fact that viewers of advertising messages
diKer from those of past decades. Todays consumers are exceedingly
diverse in age, income, and ability, and have a wider variety of expectations,
inuences, and education. Additionally, they have much greater exposure
to the constant stream of visual stimuli that todays media oKer, and
more diverse experiences responding to a world of designed messages.
For these reasons, relying solely on the designers intuition may no
longer be the most eKective approach for creating communications that
resonate with a particular audience. Instead, designers must create
empathy with the audiences for which they are designing.
51
While product designers traditionally have made greater use of data
about the people for whom their products are designed, communication
designers have more often relied on inference and personal insight
when designing communicative artifacts. The result is that these artifacts
may fail to inspire their proposed audience or, more critically, fail to
change behavior in the way that is intended. Recently, the inclusion of
user-centered, interdisciplinary methodologies in communication design
processes has helped to nd appropriate ways to reach todays viewers.
User-centered methods allow communication designers to create the
opportunity for a shared dialogue with their viewers, and more important,
to create the opportunity for behavioral and social change. When designer
and viewer are actively involved in a shared dialogue, both become
participants in the creation and interpretation of the visual message.
As a result, the designer is empowered, shifting from a decorator of
messages to an agent of inuence on the social implications of delivering
a visual dialogue.
The way in which communication designers are incorporating
research methods in their design processes to create empathy with their
viewers can be studied in the work of two design rmsLondons Wire
Design and the international agency Ogilvy and Mathers Brand
Integration Group (BIG). In reviewing the methods employed by these
rms, a strong case can be made for situating research methodologies
within the eld of communication design.
a rhetorical view of communication design

A designed message communicates by eKectively ordering and
representing the common visual languages of society. Therefore, it
possesses great potential for aKecting viewers. In its most powerful
form, communication design can inspire a behavioral change in viewers
by generating knowledge, taking action, or creating an experience.
Ann Tyler has studied how the communicated message mediates the
relationship between designer and viewer, outlining four ways in which
this relationship can be viewed: designers can create messages that act
as formal expressions, presented in isolation from the audience they
were designed for; designers can create iconic or symbolic messages,
requiring decoding and interpretation from the viewer; closely related,
designers may also create iconic or symbolic messages that are decoded

by an audience sharing specic and similar beliefs; nally, designers may
be characterized as those who create arguments that persuade an
audience by referencing key values and connecting with social attitudes.1
The latter description is known as the rhetorical view of
communication design, and allows designers and viewers to actively
co-construct meaning through the visual message, resulting in new
interactions between designer, viewer, and message. A common visual
language is the medium through which ambiguities are reduced and
diKerences are assessed. Agents taking part in the dialogue can establish
common meanings and build bridges to shared values. EKective rhetorical
communication allows individuals to relate to each other, provides a
vehicle for expression, freedom, and the discovery of truth, and ultimately
creates the possibility for social agreement within a pluralistic society.2
However, if designers attempt to persuade audiences through visual
messages without properly understanding who they are designing for,
inappropriate outcomes can result. For example, advertising messages
geared to specic audiences within HIV-positive and AIDS communities
provide an interesting social and cultural case study of the ability of
designed communications to aKect the behavior of the public at large in
appropriate or inappropriate ways. The onset of HIV and AIDS in the
United States in the mid-1980s generated numerous advertising
messages related to the disease. In 1987, the U.S. government educated
its public about the severity of the illness with a frightening message
anyone could get AIDS.3 While this was a key event for raising public
consciousness about the disease, the campaigns communication that
anyone was at risk resulted in an inability of prevention advocates to
secure government funds for educating the two highest risk groups, gay
men and intravenous drug users. Misdirecting the advertising message
resulted in an undesirable societal impact.
In 1997, the FDA began to allow drug companies to market directly
to consumers, and the resulting messages changed from pessimistic
to optimistic, depicting miraculous cures for HIV and AIDS. Once again,
the misconceptions that resulted from these advertisements made
the disease harder to ght. Research showed that gay men who saw
advertisements for HIV drugs were less likely to practice safe sex,
because advertising messages led them to believe that a quick cure was
easy to come by.4
FORLIZZI AND LEBBON: FROM FORMALISM TO SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE 53

More recently, however, advertisements for HIV drugs have
become more realistic, possibly as a result of a better understanding of
the audience that will view them. Subjects in the campaigns are depicted
more pragmatically, reviewing their options for treatment. Viewers are
implored to take stock of their personal values, and what it means to be
a safe partner and plan for a healthy future. Todays messages, targeted
appropriately to the audiences who need to hear them, persuade viewers
to assess what is healthy preventative and interventive behavior. The
HIV and AIDS campaigns make evident that understanding the intended
audience will help people take action based on increased knowledge. The
images serve as data for social and cultural inquiry because they are
concrete pieces of visual information that represent abstract concepts in
everyday social life.
a new view of user-centered research

for communication design
Designers can no longer only be concerned with the interaction of word
and image; they must also be concerned with the interaction between
the audience, the content of the communication, and the outcome of the
design. In order to create dialogues that eKectively persuade the viewer
to adopt a new belief or change behavior, the communication designer
can no longer rely solely on intuition.
Designers have to devise methods for creating empathy with the
viewer who will play a part in constructing meaning from the message.
This may mean gathering data directly from the audience for whom the
message is designed. However, the actual execution of user-centered
research related to communication design in professional practice
can be extremely limited. This is because the research may be drawn
from archetypal marketing data, may be related to a small part of a
specic project, or may be conducted within a rapid time frame.5 Once
research is completed, it is rare that ndings remain accessible to
designers. Instead, it may be lost, archived, or rarely circulated outside
of the client-designer relationship.
A few communication designers have made a call within the
community for a systematic understanding of the impact of visual messages
on the behavioral and social aspects of a community of viewers.6 Zoe
Strickler, through her research on advertising campaigns on driving

behavior in Canada, has identied a need for a knowledge base about
viewers and how they might interact with visual communications.7 The
practice, processes, and methods for conducting user research in
communication design are in their infancy, and there are a myriad of ways
to talk about conducting research and applying subsequent ndings.8
At the Helen Hamlyn Research Center at the Royal College of Art
in London in 19992003, researchers were involved with i~design,
a project that attempted to create a compendium of user research
methods in design. The goal of i~design was to determine what value
user research brings to the design process, and to build and structure a
usable source of user research methods, illustrated through case studies.
The ultimate goal was to support the design of artifacts that meet the needs
of the greatest number of users. The i~design project supplemented
earlier work done for the Methods Lab, a project that was part of the
Presence research program, one of thirteen European Unionfunded
projects under the European Network for Intelligent Information
Interfaces in 1999.9 The format and content for the Methods Lab was
composed of a series of working groups called tea parties, where
methods were discussed, rened, and evaluated.10
Despite such advances, a major problem with design methodology
remains accessibility.11 Practicing professional designers may have digculty
in rapidly translating and using the methods listed in the Methods Lab,
particularly across the cultural boundaries of the design disciplines. A
need still exists to group, organize, and make data-gathering methods
usable and readily accessible to communication designers. One approach,
adopted by i~design, is to track and log case studies of how audience
research about the audience can be conducted to identify the beliefs and
behaviors of those who will interpret the visual messages. The case
studies are demonstrable examples of choice and application of research
methods. By creating empathy with viewers, designers are freely empowered
to become active agents in the communication of the message.
How have communication design rms directly involved the audience
in the research, design, and making of the communicated message? Both
Wire Design, a small rm in the United Kingdom, and BIG, a brand
integration group within the worldwide advertising agency Ogilvy and
Mather, have realized the vision of asking viewers to examine their own
beliefs and, where needed, to make a change in their behavior. The

outcomes of the work of these forward-thinking rms have enabled
both designers and viewers to create new beliefs and to engage in new
experiences as a result of designed communications.
wire design: design with a point

In 2000, Damilola Taylor, an eight-year-old resident of Peckham, South
London, was stabbed to death near his home. The nature of his death and
the repercussions that followed led to community debate about youth
safety and the knife-carrying culture in Britains inner cities. The Southwark
Council and the Metropolitan Police were faced with the problem of how
to communicate and resolve the fallout related to the untimely death of
the young boy. Peckham residents needed communications on two
levels: community assurance about safety, and dialogue with youth
about the issues related to carrying knives. To do so, the Council turned
to Wire Design, a ten-person design rm based in London.
The Company and the Vision

Founded in 1997, Wire Design had a history of work with clients including
Nokia, the Barbican, and the New York Citybased rm Digital Vision.
Wire Design Director John Corcoran felt that, since the client list had
grown over the past ve years, and the staK worked furiously to meet
client deadlines, the rm was forced to focus exceedingly on the
decoration of messages.
However, upon being commissioned to develop a new corporate
identity for the Lewisham Council, a government organization of ten
thousand employees, the rm began to witness a change in the way that
they worked with clients. There was a marked diKerence in the way that the
Council asked for Wires input in the communication problems that they
wanted to address. Wire had the freedom and ability to both design the
content as well as the visual language of the dialogue, and it was liberating.
Inspired by the success of the work with the Lewisham Council, the
Metropolitan Police and the Southwark Council approached Wire to
create communications for their knife safety campaign. Based on his
learning experience with Lewisham, Corcoran frankly told the Southwark
clients that his rm could not begin to generate solutions to the problem
at hand until they could gain a better understanding of the audience
they were designing foryouth and knife carriers. Wire recognized the

need to reframe the problem in terms of values, rather than the clients
objectives. Based on their work with the Lewisham Council, Corcoran
knew that the appropriate images, language, and style would be
unattainable without a thorough understanding of what would resonate
with the audience.
The Dialogue
To move ahead from their basic assumptions, Corcoran and his staK
began their research with the South London police. They reviewed
statistical data on knife attacks and listened to the assumptions and
beliefs of local police ogcers about what the communications campaign
should do. For example, police had perceived a change in the age and
reasons for young teenagers carrying knives in the street. Since the
death of Taylor, children as young as age nine were carrying knives out
of fear. Police felt strongly about communicating a positive message, as
well as reinforcing the strength of the community, without delivering
threats to youth or making promises to those concerned about safety.
The message would be delivered in public spaces and primary schools,
and serve as a discussion point for parents, grandparents, and teachers.
The message could neither glamorize nor dramatize knife carrying.
Wire Design worked with Cherie Lebbon, a researcher at the
Helen Hamlyn Research Center, to create an eKective research strategy
for developing empathy with the various constituencies of the audience.
Corcoran felt that it would be critical to choose the most appropriate
visual language for understanding a teenagers perspective and
beginning a dialogue.
Corcoran and Lebbon made two visits to a Southwark school. The
goal of the rst visit was to get a sense of what visual languages and
messages might be most appropriate for an audience of thirteen- and
fourteen-year-olds. Wire developed a ctional band, Trainer, and
created twelve CD covers in a variety of visual styles (fig. 1 ). Students
were asked to associate each example with a particular age group.
The second visit took the form of a group interview with the goal of
understanding the students perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and
language related to knife carrying and safety. Additionally, students
evaluated image boards in light of those conversations (fig. 2 ).

Left: fig. 1 Middle-school students evaluated CD covers for a ctional band called
Trainer. Right: fig. 2 Wire Designs nal poster for the Southwark knife campaign.
The nal poster employs a combination of photographic and

illustrative techniques, chosen as a direct result of what Corcoran and
Lebbon learned from their studies with the teens. The result is a poster
that is driven by visual impact: the image of an older teen, representing
aspiration to a certain kind of life, situated in a church environment
representing fear of failure in front of family and friends. The imagery,
deliberately chosen to create a contrast of hope and despair, is
augmented with the text Keep your future safe. Dont carry a knife. The
choice of the word safe alludes to safety in the form of freedom from
harm and a safe as a treasure of life. It was a word chosen directly from
the vocabulary that emerged from talking with the teens, that
represented the qualities of being good, cool, and under control.
Situating the Message in the Community

Based on the success of the youth poster, Wire Design was asked by
the Southwark Council to create a version of the poster for use in the
community at large. To support this audience, Wire modied the copy
on the poster, placing more emphasis on the word safe and enlarging
the type to make the poster accessible to an older population. The
Metropolitan Police logo was added for more credibility and reassurance.
Corcoran and Lebbon conducted subjective tests of the second
poster to understand the eKectiveness of the message, learning that

elders between the ages of sixty and seventy-ve responded positively
to the message. Both the youth and the community posters, designed
with specic needs of each audience in mind, instilled a sense of safety
and positive change within the community.
ogilv y and mather: tipping the culture

In 1999, the U.S. government realized the need for assistance in conceiving
of and producing public service announcements. The government
wanted to gain critical mass for their national anti-drug campaign aimed
at teens and young adults. Instead of typical television advertisements
aired during undesirable slots on early morning television, the
government would have to compete for and purchase prime media time.
To do so, the Ogce of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) turned to
Ogilvy and Mather and its Brand Integration Group (BIG).
The Company and the Vision

Ogilvy and Mather has led hundreds of successful campaigns since its
inception in 1948. However, in 1999 the agency made a major strategic
change by bringing in Brian Collins to head BIG, the group within the
agency in existence since 1997 that specializes in revitalizing and
repositioning brands and integrating them with the mass media.12
Collins surrounded himself with a staK that was well practiced in
creating dialogues in disciplines other than design, such as theater, book
publishing, and even biology. In this way, BIG could be sure that its
constituents did not overly rely on the often-tried and relied-upon codes
of advertising.
Based on their work for American Express and Motorola, BIG was
hired to brand the national anti-drug campaign. ONDCP had never
had a branded campaign before. Instead, the Partnership for a Drug Free
America had simply served as the body that organized agencies who
would donate services to the cause. BIG was charged with creating a
brand vision around which multiple themes could be executed but would
remain consistent.
In order to understand the visual language and dialogue that would
be most eKective for teens, BIG pored through vast amounts of research
from ONDCP, from which Collins was able to develop and assert a
hypothesis: teens could be steered away from drugs and drinking by

fig. 3 A nal poster from the Whats Your Anti-Drug? campaign. The visual design of
the tag line invites the viewer to ll in his or her own response to the question. Additional
copy in handwritten script motivates dialogues on several levels.
allowing themselves to connect to larger and more positive forces in life.

By engaging in activities such as dancing, biking, working with a family
business, sports, or school events, each teen could foster a unique
relationship with the universe.
To test and verify the hypothesis, BIG talked to teens, using focus
groups and insight groups as the primary methods to learn their beliefs
and attitudes. Collins felt very strongly that the ONDCP message needed
to foster a conversation without being pedantic, parental, or overbearing.
He and his group also researched mythology and stories about achieving
the grail in order to recall the digcult and painful process of nding a
personal path in the world. If the invitation to take part in a dialogue was
appropriately extended, teens would be interested in participating
rather than feeling as though they were being told to do something.

fig. 4 www.whatsyourantidrug.com, a website inviting shared dialogue among teens.
The Dialogue
The mythology stories, along with the time spent researching teens,
served as a direct catalyst for the BIG team. Charles Hall, a senior writer
at BIG, emerged with the question, Whats your anti-drug? (fig. 3 ).
This phrase, which is represented with a handwritten script and graphic
structure that invites completion, served to spark appropriate dialogues
on several levels. First, it motivated those responsible for engaging in
communication: teens, who could identify with and communicate about
what made them feel positive and unique; and parents, who could
engage in dialogue with teens about drug addiction and positive
behaviors. Second, the phrase motivated those responsible for making
the communication: other ONDCP agencies would be able to extend and
co-construct the brand by creating new and evolving artifacts.
As the campaign unfolded, opportunities to gain empathy for the
recipients of the message continued. For example, teens were invited to
a web site, www.whatsyourantidrug.com, to talk about what their
personal connection to the universe was (fig. 4 ). Each message that was
left by a visitor was developed into an excerpt using images, music, and
voiceovers. Some were done by BIG and some by other agencies. Some
were chosen and further developed into television commercials.

Situating the Message in the Community
The resulting artifacts from the campaignplaced in theaters, schools,
and public arenas including the web and televisioncalled upon viewers
to think, act, feel, and engage with the dialogue at hand. Collins has
followed both the quantitative and qualitative changes in the community
as a result of the campaign. ONDCP reported that the awareness of the
anti-drug campaign was at a historical high point. Collins recalled the
story of one of the BIG group members who, while attending a movie,
witnessed a conversation that took place between a parent and a teen as
a result of seeing the poster displayed in the theater. Collins himself
received a letter from a parent thanking him for opening an honest and
eKective dialogue with society. These facts and recollections are pieces
of evidence that design has the power to do what Collins describes as
tipping the culturecreating understanding, new points of view, and
new entries into experience.
conclusion
Wire Design and BIGs stories make clear the benet of situating design
research methodologies within the eld of communication design. In
both cases, designers were empowered to create a common ground for
dialogue, community-building, and behavioral change.
EKective rhetorical communications such as these have great
implications for society. They are vehicles for expression, social agreement,
and social change, allowing communication to move beyond a process of
faster and better information transfer. Instead, communication evolves
as a ritual process where sharing, participation, and community-building
work toward maintaining society and representing and promoting
shared beliefs.13 These implications set forth an exciting new charter for
design research.
First published in Design Issues 18, no. 4 (Autumn 2002).

notes
1. Tyler characterized four perspectives on the relationship of the audience to the

communication process in order to set forth a new agenda for design inquiry. See
Ann C. Tyler, Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication in
this volume.
2. Richard McKeon, Communication, Truth, and Society in Z. K. McKeon, ed.,
Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to the Thought of Richard
McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 96.
3. Blairs article in the New York Times Ideas and Trends column from August 2001
chronicled the short history of advertising related to HIV and AIDS awareness and
treatment. See Jayson Blair, Healthy Skepticism and the Marketing of AIDS in
the New York Times (August 5, 2001): 14.
4. Ibid., 14.
5. Susan Roth originally addressed the evolving eld of design research in an essay
published in the proceedings of the No GuruNo Method? conference in
Helsinki in 1997. See Susan Roth, The State of Design Research, in Design Issues 15,
no. 2 (Summer 1999): 18.
6. Jorge Frascara and Zoe Strickler have both been concerned with the inclusion of
social issues as a concern for graphic designers. See Frascara, Graphic Design:
Fine Art or Social Science? in this volume, and Strickler, Elicitation Methods in
Experimental Design Research in Design Issues 15, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 27.
7. Strickler, Elicitation Methods in Experimental Design Research, 18.
8. My thoughts on this issue have been greatly inuenced by informal conversations
with Richard Buchanan as both an advisor and colleague, as well as the PhD-
Design discussion distribution list (PhD-design@jiscmail.ac.uk). For an additional
overview, see Nigel Cross, Design Research: A Disciplined Conversation, in
Design Issues 15, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 5.
9. Alastair S. MacDonald and Cherie S. Lebbon, The Methods Lab: Developing a
Usable Compendium of User Research Methods. ICED 01, the International
Conference on Engineering Design, Glasgow, August 2123, 2001.
10. The Presence Project was a revolutionary design research project funded by the
EU and contributed to by both industrial and academic partners. See Kay
Hofmeester and Esther de Charon de Saint Germain, eds., Presence: New Media
for Older People (Amsterdam: Netherlands Design Institute, 1999). A website,
www.presenceweb.org, also was developed as a resource to the community
(permanently disabled).
11. MacDonald and Lebbon, The Methods Lab, 3.
12. Steven Heller, The B.I.G. Idea, Print Magazine (November/December 2000).
13. For a thorough discussion of the diKerences between communication as
transmission and communication as ritual, see James Carey, Culture as
Communication: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Carey
argues that the ritual view is less explored because the concept is weak in
American social thought.

chapter 4
Being Serious, Being Popular:

Positioning Design Research
LIZ C. THROOP
In recent years design theorists such as Sharon Poggenpohl, Dietmar

Winkler, Paul Nini, and others have encouraged graphic designers and
design educators to take up research seriously.1 There are many forms of
design research, but conventional market research is the kind most familiar
to practicing graphic designers. This method, systematically checking
audience responses to designs, is not always popular with designers, and
its real and perceived limitations must be addressed if we are to
convince broad segments of practicing designers to embrace research.
Approaches to design can be broken down into two categories, the
expressive and the pragmatic. Expressive design is entertaining and
memorable, whereas pragmatic design is informative. In actuality, design
projects mix both approaches, but the distinction here will help to clarify
when research is most appropriate. This typology is also helpful in thinking
about how research practices can be popularized within the profession.
George Lois is an exemplary practitioner of an expressive approach
to design. There is a very strong relationship between elements in his
work: word and image work together to create a condensed message with
aesthetic and emotional impact. Loiss contribution to the development
of graphic design and advertising is hard to overestimate. He came to
the legendary advertising rm Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959 and quickly
64
absorbed copywriter Bill Bernbachs method of replacing mere
illustrated stories with truly visual concepts. Work coming from DDB
was unique because their whole method of creating ads (teaming up
copywriters and designers and allowing their jobs to overlap) was
radically new. Lois went on to design not just advertisements but
magazine covers and whole product lines based on big ideas that were
as visual as they were verbal.2 This approach has since been widely
emulated by creatives both inside and outside advertising agencies, and
is highly conspicuous in design competitions and books and magazine
articles about designers.
Lois has saidrepeatedlyabout research, You cant research a
big idea. The only ideas that truly research well are mediocre ideas. In
research, great ideas are always suspect.3 He is correct that conventional
research has limitations. Big ideas are arrived at through taking creative
risks, while testing, as it is employed by advertising and marketing agencies,
is usually undertaken to minimize risk. Risk takers like Lois created new
forms and surprising, attention-getting work by not following rules,
whereas conventional research is all about following rules and testing
existing forms.
Lois has detailed his many successes in books and articles.
Designing covers for an intelligent magazine like Esquire to compete with
1960s girlie magazines called for big ideas. Naming a breakthrough
product such as Lean Cuisine called for a big idea. Nailing a catchphrase
for MTVs youth audience, I want my MTV! had to be a big idea.
Nevertheless, even Lois, in his book Whats the Big Idea?, acknowledged
that research is an essential discipline of advertising life.4
Lois has repeatedly made good use of research that is provided as
background information, as long as he has been able to use it at his
discretion. He has been quick to cite research when his campaigns can
be statistically shown to create greater sales or greater consumer
awareness. What Lois objects to is subjecting his novel designs to focus
groups and the like to try to predict the publics reaction, which he sees,
probably rightly, as a way for timid clients to kill bold ideas without
taking direct responsibility.5 Such clients rely on a well-known weakness
of audience research, namely that people generally lacking imagination
and taste are asked to pass judgment on work created by people with
considerable imagination and taste.
65
Research subjects may not be able to conceive of being receptive to
a campaign or a particular design, when in fact this is a limitation of their
imagination rather than of the design itself. These individuals might
respond well to such work if it were, in fact, actually distributed through
normal channels rather than presented in a research setting.6 Viewers
normally respond to designs without conscious deliberation. Even the act
of considering a given design is likely to dampen the normal, spontaneous
reactions of non-expert viewers.7 Qualitative research methods have come
a long way since Lois originally voiced his objections, and ethnographic
research techniques allow researchers to nd out how non-experts feel
without putting them on the spot.8 Popular conceptions of audience
research, however, have not caught up. Persistent images of clipboard-
toting dweebs and endless email questionnaires, all demanding simplistic
numerical responses to complex matters of art and human nature, live in
the minds of graphic designers as well as the general public. Focus
groups are, in the popular imagination, misplaced attempts to nd out
how most people would react to a completed design, rather than
places to cull raw material for a designers expressive response. Certainly
young designers should be exposed to the innovative ways design
research is now employed.
But not all design issues are a matter of expression. Product safety
manuals, websites for purchasing airplane tickets, and election ballots
all need to be, primarily, comprehensible. Impulsive responses rely on
expressive approaches, but it is pragmatic design that can help
audiences in weighty matters. Careful deliberation by designers
and user testing can make audience experiences more forgettable
than memorableand, sometimes, blessedly so.
An example of such a pragmatic approach is a current project for
St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Graphic
designers at the Center for Multimedia Arts (CMA) in the University of
Memphiss FedEx Institute of Technology are part of a team of professionals
working to overhaul and rene the hospitals informed consent
procedures. Currently, when parents are told their child has cancer, they
are immediately given a thirty-page document outlining the hospitals
suggested treatment protocol. At once, they must digest both the
devastating news about their childs health and the complex content of
the document. Doctors go through the document with the parents,

non-physician staK help decode some of the medical terms into plain
English, and translators are on hand to aid non-English-speaking
parentsall culminating in the parents decision to agree to or deny the
suggested treatment. The doctors, patients, parents, and non-physician
staK all recognize that informed consent cannot occur in one highly
stressful moment.
The research team is working with all of these constituents to
determine a more eKective strategy for delivering this information. They
are working on transforming the informed consent process from a highly
temporal event into a continuing process that follows the patients and
their parents through treatment and recovery. The new approach will be
a signicant improvement over the current documents, which are highly
technical and confusing to laypersons. According to the CMAs director,
Michael Schmidt, graphic designers have led focus groups with parents,
teen patients, physicians, and other members of the hospital staK. They
are using both traditional and innovative research methods to get a sense
of how parents decide on courses of treatment for their children.9 From
this research, designers will devise interactive informational experiences,
revising the manner in which parents review the treatment protocols,
and even redesign the physical spaces in which parents view such
information. While the new materials may please viewers, they are not
meant to be memorable or amusing in the way that Loiss big ideas are.
Both expressive and pragmatic designs can be complex in their own
ways. Loiss 1968 Esquire cover of Muhammad Ali is visually simple, yet
richly meaningful to audiences who grasp its complex semantics. On this
cover, the boxer stands with his face turned upward, his body pierced by
arrows. His white shoes and trunks blend into the white sweep behind
him. Type carefully placed next to his foot reads, The Passion of
Muhammad Ali. This extended metaphor relies on viewers familiarity
with the use of the word passion in relation to a religious gure, and with
Saint Sebastians martyrdom by being shot with arrows. Readers would
recognize the pose if they were familiar with the Botticini painting of
Saint Sebastian in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.10 The original
audience, magazine readers of 1968, would also have been aware of Alis
status as a vocal war resister (for which he had lost his boxing license)
and as a religious non-conformist (he had recently and controversially
converted to Islam). The stark white backdrop and clothing bring
THROOP: BEING SERIOUS, BEING POPULAR 67

attention to the blackness of Alis skin, which alludes to the racial
climate of the 1960s. Ali spoke out at a time in which few African-
American celebrities had made it into the mainstream. Of those who
had, all had carefully avoided controversy. Loiss messagethat this
champion athlete was nevertheless being persecuted because of his
raceis formed into a unied and coherent composition. Loiss concept
for the cover came from his creative intuition, and a culturally informed
audience would likewise grasp its meaning intuitively. The design is
expressive in the sense that it is a window into Loiss positive sentiments:
we trust his expressive impulse to guide us to something true.
Loiss image was highly readable and memorable to its audience
at the time. The key purpose of the image, for Esquire, was to invite a
simple, spontaneous responsea magazine purchaseon the part of the
viewer. It is reproduced in many books about graphic design today for
the elegant succinctness of its message. Viewing the work, like other
expressive design, is pleasurable and amusing, despite the seriousness of
the message.
Lois attributes his successful Esquire covers largely to the extraordinary
freedom provided by his editor, Harold Hayes.11 Lois was able to express
himself without worrying that his work would be subjected to focus
groups or similar research practices. His Esquire covers are very sexy,
precisely in the sense that Sharon Poggenpohl uses the word when
noting, Research is not sexy.12 Yet research can be used to create
incredibly powerful work of a pragmatic nature.
The St. Jude project, on the other hand, has been developed
through extensive user research. It does call for creativity on the part of
designers, but more on the order of incremental creativity than a-ha
creativity.13 In fact, creative authorship of the project is distributed
among the design team, and even among focus group members whose
insights help shape the nal design. Part of the designers creative
contribution will be selecting what research ndings can be implemented
most feasibly.
Unlike Loiss largely urbane American male audience, the designers
on the St. Jude project contend with a diverse audience, and they cannot
make many assumptions about how viewers will respond to culturally
based symbols. The central design artifact will be a digital gateway to
information resources specically tailored to the needs of each family.

Deliberation, via research, about the pros and cons of the St. Jude
materials helps the designers to rene their ideas to make them
acceptable to most users.
The viewers conscious appreciation of the nal design project should
be subtle or nonexistent. If the aesthetic qualities of the work have any
emotional impact, it should probably be that of reassuring orderliness.
The project team is creating a digital space for patients and parents to
create a scrapbook of the rst one hundred critical days of treatment
and the subsequent recovery period. With the support and permission of
each family, these digital scrapbooks will form an archive, providing new
patients and their families an online source of moral support.
What research-driven design lacks in sexiness it can make up for in
broader impact. Risk reduction is a very valuable benet of research in
the St. Jude project, given that the consequences may be the life or death
of sick children. While such work may seem less signicant in terms of
artistry (artistry here meaning romantic works of individual expression),
it may transmit hugely signicant content. Pragmatic work is a means to
an end, rather than an end in itself.
Expressive design, to extend the typology, tends to be witty,
memorable, and entertaining. Part of that entertaining quality arises
from the sense of cultural closeness between the designer and the
viewer that the design conveys. Pragmatic design tends to be useful and
important. It is important that it communicate to everyone in its
intended audience.
We all want design to be important, but we also want it to be sexy,
to be fun. Design involves both, but our attitudes toward embracing
researchstudying how it is conducted, building relationships with
researchers in related elds, applying results even when they are not
what we were hoping foroccasionally involve choosing one approach
over the other. Such choices may have to do with our values and
personalities, but also with what weve been shown, or led to believe,
about what design can be.
Big idea magazine covers like George Loiss have passed from the
magazine rack.14 Nevertheless, works that are most conspicuous to
design professionalsthose reproduced in awards annuals and
professional magazinestend toward expressive approaches. Such work
can be appreciated from viewing thumbnail-size reproductions because

they communicate succinctly. Expressive works succeed as discreet
objects and are well suited to presentations, keeping lectures lively and
entertaining. From a design point of view, expressive work does best
when it is free from post hoc audience research, whether or not this is the
case from a business point of view.
Pragmatic design, such as the St. Jude project, must be fully
experienced to be fully appreciated: the legibility of the text is as important
as its style. Pragmatic work often succeeds because of the way it builds
interrelationships between discrete artifacts. A pragmatic approach can
involve large, complex issues that extend beyond traditional graphic
design and overlap such elds as information architecture, experience
design, and human factors design. Pragmatic work is designed to t in
with everyday life, as opposed to jumping out from it.
Perhaps the conspicuousness of expressive design helps explain why
many graphic designers and graphic design educators have fallen back
on Loiss pronouncement, You cant research a big idea, or something
similar, in order to dismiss design research. Professionals face pressure
to get work into awards annuals to attract new clients. Design students
feel pressure to create work that will get noticed in hurried job interviews
or in online portfolios. Everyone feels pressure to emulate the work they
see receiving recognition. In many college graphic design programs,
research is more likely to involve scanning images from old books or
taking photographs than systematically checking audience responses.
The result is that few graduates of graphic design programs speak
the language of research. Few could explain the diKerence between
qualitative and quantitative research, between empirical and scientic
research, or describe the limitations of a Likert scale. Few designers
would recognize a skewed population sample. Fewer would know how to
argue with a client who tells them to design in response to questionable
ndings. Nevertheless, many practicing designers do try to conduct
audience research themselves, though there is a real risk that these
designers are merely identifying people whose judgments match their
own preconceived ideas.
In order to encourage design research, we must develop ways to
showcase research-driven design. Fortunately, digital media allows new
kinds of opportunities to present large, complex design projects in
detail. Designers will be motivated to learn about design research when

they see what it can generate. Finding ways to visually represent how
projects such as St. Jude succeed is a serious challenge, but not beyond
those in the eld.
Another reason for the inconspicuousness of research-based
design has been the secretive and proprietary nature of research within
the corporate sphere. Projects such as that between St. Jude and the
CMA provide rare opportunities to share knowledge with others in
the profession. Conducting research in the academic arena can increase
not only the ow but also the nature of the information gathered.
Poggenpohl describes research within the industry as being quick,
focused clinical research that is designed for actionable results.15 Rather
than lunging from one such project to the next, design academicians
have both time and training to place specic research ndings within
larger theoretical frameworks.
Advocates of design research are challenged by the preconceptions
of some designers. They must be careful to address the well-known
pitfalls of subjecting expressive works of design to conventional
audience research. Nevertheless, designers can and should benet from
undertaking user research when it is well suited to projects, especially
pragmatic onesthat is, projects that extend over a system of artifacts;
projects that are high-stakes for the viewers; and projects whose audiences
may be culturally diKerent from the designer. Showcasing work that
benets from design research will help make designers more receptive
to learning about research practices. Bringing visibility to the results of
design research is challenging in terms of how the work is presented,
because it does not always look sexy, and also because design research
often constitutes trade secrets. For this reason, design educators can
have real impact by carrying out model design research projects and
sharing their insights about their processes and their ndings.

notes
1. See Sharon H. Poggenpohl, Why We Need Design Research, Graphic Design

Journal 4 (Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, 1996): 2021; Paul Nini,
Sharpening Ones Axe, in this volume; and Dietmar Winkler, et al., Design
Practice and Education: Moving beyond the Bauhaus Model, in Jorge Frascara, ed.,
User-Centered Graphic Design (London and Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1997).
2. Andrea Codrington, George Lois: George of the Jungle, Graphic Design USA 18
(New York: Watson-Guptill, 1998).
3. Steven Heller, George Lois, Eye Magazine 8, no. 29 (Autumn 1998). Tibor Kalman
makes similar assertions in Heller, et al., Graphic Design in America: A Visual
Language History (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: Abrams, 1989), 14547.
4. George Lois, with Bill Pitts, Whats the Big Idea? (New York: Plume, 1993), 12129.
5. Ibid.
6. Joe Langford and Deana McDonagh, eds., Focus Groups: Supporting EKective
Product Development (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 131.
7. Jonathan W. Schooler and Tonya Y. Engstler-Schooler, Verbal Overshadowing of
Visual Memories: Some Things are Better Left Unsaid, Cognitive Psychology 22
(1990): 3671. In their studies, verbalizing the appearance of previously seen visual
stimuli impaired subsequent recognition performance.
8. Timothy D. Wilson, Dolores Kraft, and Dana S. Dunn, The Disruptive EKects of
Explaining Attitudes: The Moderating EKect of Knowledge about the Attitude
Object, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 25 (September 1989): 379400.
9. Michael Schmidt, correspondence with author, February and May 2005. Schmidt
presented an account of this project on the panel Alternative Models for
Research and Writing in Design Studies, hosted by Michael Golec, Design Studies
Forum Special Session at the College Art Association Annual Conference, 2005.
10. Lois, in his book Whats the Big Idea?, attributed the tempera and oil painting of
Saint Sebastian to Andrea del Castagno, but it was probably painted by Francesco
Botticini in the mid-1400s. Metropolitan Museum of Art Provenance Research
Project, http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/provenance (accessed May 23,
2005).
11. Robert Smith, The Crazy Days of Harold Hayes, Columbia Journalism Review 34,
no. 2 (July/August 1995): 55.
12. Poggenpohl, Why We Need Design Research, 20.
13. Robert W. Weisberg, Creativity: Genius and Other Myths (New York: W. H. Freeman,
1986).
14. Michael Bierut, The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine
Cover, Design Observer, http://DesignObserver.com/archives/000103.html
(accessed May 23, 2005).
15. Sharon H. Poggenpohl, Developing Theory, Analysis and EKective Research
Communication for Design, Visible Language 37, no. 1 (2003): 511.
72
chapter 5
Activity Theory:
A Model for Design Research
JUDY DAMMASSO TARBOX
Theory is dened as the general or abstract principles of a body of fact,

science, or arta belief, policy, or procedure proposed or followed as the
basis of action. In science, this means objective, empirical studies grounded
in hard facts; in the humanities, this means interpretation of phenomena.
Both encompass careful, systematic, and self-conscious discussion
and analyses. The eld of design has actually used a combination of
both. Interpretation and intuition have played a key role with designers
feeling their way through a situation based on their past experiences
and professional expertise, while empirical studies have played a role in
the areas of visual literacy and in basic design research on the way
people view certain visual features such as fonts, color, or spacing, among
others. We are, however, at a crossroads in the area of design, as visuals
become even more critical and pervasive in the expanding avenues of
communication in todays society. This is further complicated by the
merging of cultures and the burgeoning global society resulting from the
world wide web. As such, traditional theories and instinct may no longer
be adequate as a base in the eld of design. This is where activity theory,
a social constructivist theory that is being used in interface design, can
play a critical role in providing groundwork for design research. It does
so by looking at how we approach design from a contextual perspective.
73
Throughout history visuals have been a signicant tool within the
greater society. From the monastic illuminated manuscripts of the
Middle Ages to eighteenth-century utilitarian instruction manuals using
copperplate drawings and woodcuts, visuals have played a key role in the
conveyance of information and ideas. As our culture grew more literate,
text became the media of choice and, for many years, consumed the
visual components. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the invention
of mass media, photography, color lithography, and improvements in
printing both images and photographs exponentially increased visual
documentation and pictorial information. Today, we nd ourselves amidst
a visual culture that has undergone an even more expansive sea change,
as mass media and digital media are changing how we communicate
across cultural boundaries, and a new visual language is developing that
integrates both textual and visual objects. The result is a changing of the
relationship between word and image from a text-dominated equation
to one more equally balanced. Images are no longer just pretty
pictures providing aesthetic appeal and the reagrmation of what was
already known through words. Instead, technological advances and new
communication venues cause a merging of cultures in which visual
contexts are always changing and the components, text and images, take
on new roles. Specically, images are once again important factors in the
conveyance of information and ideas, and it has become essential for
designers to gain awareness of the importance of visual information
within this larger, more global context. In addition, how a piece is
received and understood is impacted by these external forces. Therefore,
it is necessary to approach design from an external perspective that
takes all the competing components into account while not losing the
existing research base. Activity theory can help with this transformation.
ac tivit y theory as a design approach

As stated above, design theory is molded from some very specic disciplines
that include facets of psychologyspecically cognitive psychology
and principles such as Gestalt. Cognitive theory works on the premise
that internal elements within the brain are causal in directing human
behavior. Activity theory, however, takes the opposite approach and looks
at external environments and cultural context. It stems from a branch of
psychology developed by Lev Vygotsky, an early-twentieth-century

Russian psychologist, and is not a traditional theory with constructs and
hypotheses. Rather, it is a concept developed to analyze human behavior
from a social, contextual perspective. Vygotsky viewed other branches of
psychology as too stringent: behaviorists studied psychology based on
behavior alonewithout the mindwhile subjectivists studied psychology
based on the mind alone. Vygotsky rejected this. He believed the mind
did not work in isolation; rather it was inuenced by environment and
the context of the specic situation and activity taking place.
Over the years many scholars and psychologists have expanded
the concept of activity theory. One modern scholar working in this eld
is Yrjo Engestrom, who gives various themes that help dene the nature
of activity:
Activity theory is based on object-related activity versus
goal-directed action; it deals with objects versus a psychic
process; it is concerned with the history of the activity versus
the relativism of the present alone; it deals with creation and
externalization of new tools versus the internal process only.1
This has led to the creation of a model of how activity works. The model
stems from the activity triangle created by Vygotsky and expanded on
by Engestrom (fig. 1 ).
We can now easily dene how an activity system works within a
graphic design paradigm. The subject is the main person involved with
a specic activity that is trying to work toward the object, which is a
specic goal. In a design paradigm, the subject is the designer, and the
object is the creation of a total piece that is eKective at conveying
information, not just for aesthetic purposes. It is tied to a specic activity,
such as designing a digital piece for instructional purposes, designing a
print piece to advertise a specic event, designing a museum exhibit,
and so on. In order to reach this goal, the subject interacts with various
tools or mediating artifacts that are, again, specic to this particular
activity. It is important to note that these tools bring with them their
specic history. In order to use these tools, the subject engages in a
series of operations which are rote and automaticin the case of the
designer, this could be the collected knowledge of experience and
instinct along with traditional design tools and principles such as Gestalt.
Activity theory does not rule out the inclusion of other theories, but
rather provides an organizational structure that includes and expands
TA R B OX : AC T I V I T Y T H E O RY 75
fig. 1 Meta-context as modeled by activity theory represents the meta design
environment: this is the research phase of the process. Activity theory helps set up
the model to organize the process.
upon them. These operations combine to form actions which are not
automatic at rst but can become so as the subject uses them over time.
As this part of the activity is going on, it is also being inuenced by other
parts of the total environment. For example, the goal is mediated by the
division of labor. This is not necessarily a breakdown of people, as in
division of labor within a corporate structure. In a design activity
system, this can be viewed as the types of assessment methods used to
determine if the ultimate goal has been met (has the piece eKectively
conveyed information); or it can also be genre (is the piece supposed to
work in a universal environment versus a more socially constructed
environment); or it can be a breakdown of people that are involved in the
creative process (printers, museum directors, and so on). These are in
turn interacting with the overall communityin this case the specic
audience of the activity (the students using an instructional piece, the
potential audience of the event, the people going to the exhibit).
The community sets rules which mediate the types of operations
and actions the subject uses. Again, in a design environment these can

be various cultural standards such as use of color, language, etc. In the
case of the instructional piece, student learning styles are important; in
the case of the advertisement, cultural and ethnic conditions might play
a role, and so on. As a result of these additional factors, the activity itself
is always in a state of uxthe way cultures are being changed and
redened as a result of todays global communication structure.
Designers must constantly be aware of this and adapt their creation
process to reect these inuences. This leads to another phenomenon,
described by activity theory as that of tool creation and restructuration.
As the activity progresses over time, the various tools are changed or
new tools are created that help improve the subjects overall performance
and ability to reach the intended goal. For example, a designer that
traditionally works by interpretation and intuition might nd premises of
visual literacy helpful in certain situations. These premises, while
consciously thought out at rst, might combine with various instinctive
aspects and become new, automatic tools drawn on in future design
activities. Thus their behavior is changed to reect the inclusion of
external factors into the ultimate creation of the piece (object). In short,
it can be said that activity is object-oriented and motivation comes from
transferring the object into an outcome or goalin this case to convey
information as well as to provide an aesthetically pleasing piece.
Unfortunately, in actual situations, what sometimes happens is a
breach between various components, causing tensions to arise that
prevent the goal from being achieved. A simplied example could be a
designer creating a digital piece for online instruction. Perhaps the
designer has done this type of work many times before and relies heavily
on the existing tools of instinct, interpretation, and cognitive-based
research. All of these are valid and should indeed be considered.
However, various external rules might easily be overlooked, or more
likely, might have changed as the culture evolves. Academic standards,
cultural conditions, and learning styles might be missed, thus creating
tensions between the designer and the community that is also engaged
in the activity. In addition, considering these external conditions
might impact what tools the designer uses and how these tools might
be modied and reconstructed in the future. It is important to note here
that tools can be as concrete as a specic software program or as
visceral as combinations of words and images. In either case, activity
theory provides a platform for designers to look at all the components
of a specic situation, and it impacts the way we approach design by
looking carefully and specically at these external factors. Furthermore,
it changes the way we think about designcoming from external elements
and not based solely on internal, cognitive, or intuitive elements.
With the understanding of how activity theory works from the
perspective of the designer as subject, the theory can also be converted
into a specic heuristic to be used in design situations with the piece
itself as the subject. The actual design situation can be plotted as
described abovethe overall context or meta modeland the specic
piece can be designed using the model as well. In this way, it is possible
to nd tensions that arise within the design process as well as between
the context and the piece itself.
ac tivit y theory as a heuristic device

In their article Characterizing Web Heuristics, Meno de Jong and
Thea van der Geest give an excellent explanation of the role of heuristics
in general:
A heuristic is a discovery aid. It helps problem solvers (and
we consider Web designers as such) to identify a problem,
to get an overview of the range of options to choose from,
and to make sensible choices. We assume that designers are
using some kind of heuristic if they use an aid or procedure
that helps them to choose in a well-reasoned way a particular
design approach or a particular design option, or if it helps
them to assess the qualities of an option. Heuristics may be
prescriptive or instructive, and they usually take the form of
lists of questions, principles, or checkpoints.2
While de Jong and van der Geest are describing traditional heuristics,
activity theoryspecically the model presented abovecan also be
used in this manner. First, consider the role of visuals within the activity
theory environment: they convey meaning as the object of the piece;
and they are tools that work in context with other objects; they can be
cultural or universal in nature, depending on the rules that govern the
situation. In short, they t the model very strategically. Now consider
the following activity theory diagram, and use these questions to guide
the design process (fig. 2 ):

fig. 2 Specic design context represents the specic design process itself. Note how
some of the areas shift while the overall object or goal remains the same. As each area
is eshed out for a specic project, it is easy to locate tensions that might exist between
this gure and the previous one.
1. What is the specic piece (subject) of the activity?

2. How does it t within the larger context (meta-activity system)?
3. What type of pieces are generally used within this system?
4. What tensions exist, if any, between the overall environment/
context and these types of pieces?
5. What role will visuals play in the overall activity (piece)?
6. Who is the community/audience involved?
7. What is the overall object/goal of the activity, or, why is the piece
being created?
8. What tools have traditionally been used in creating pieces of
this genre?
9. How have they changed/could they be changed to help achieve
the ultimate objective of this piece?
10. What rules best suit this audience (for example, cultural or
universal)?
11. Are these adequate for the audience, or are there other rules
one might consider?
12. How does the activity break down? What is the division of labor?
In their article, de Jong and van der Geest mention heuristics taking on a
prescriptive or instructive form.3 Designers have indeed used various
prescriptive, longstanding methods in approaching a piece. Activity
theory, and the model it provides, enhances this process and gives a means
to visualize and organize it in a more instructional way. Furthermore, it
expands the process and helps identify tensions that might exist between
the segments of the audience, subject, or object, thereby enabling us to
make decisions based on the total environment and context of a piece,
and ultimately making it more eKective.

notes
1. Yrjo Engestrom, Activity Theory and Individual and Social Transformation, in

Perspectives on Activity Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1938.
2. Meno de Jong and Thea van der Geest, Characterizing Web Heuristics, in Technical
Communication 47, no. 3 (2000): 31126. http://www.techcommonline.org/issues/
v47n3/full/0407.html.
3. Ibid.
references
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print,
2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2001.
Clair, Kate. A Typographic Workbook: A Primer to History, Techniques, and Artistry. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
Horn, Robert. Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. Bainbridge
Island, WA: MacroVU, 1998.
Kirkman, John. From Chore to Profession: How Technical Communication in the United
Kingdom has Changed Over the Past Twenty-ve Years. Journal of Technical
Writing and Communication 26, no. 2 (1996): 14761.
Kuutti, Kari. Activity Theory as a Potential Framework for Human-Computer
Interaction Research. In Nardi, Bonnie A., ed., Context and Consciousness: Activity
Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, 1744.
Mathews, Mitford M. Teaching To Read: Historically Considered. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966.
McKenzie, Jamie. Learning Digitally. From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal 8,
no. 3 (1998). http://www.fno.org/nov98/digital.html.
Meggs, Phillip B. A History of Graphic Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold
Company, 1983.
Roblyer, Margaret D. Visual Literacy: Seeing a New Rationale. Learning and Leading
with Technology 26, no. 2 (1998): 5154.
Schnackenberg, Heidi L., Kevin Chin, and Roci J. Luppicini. Heuristic and Formative
Evaluation: A Case Study Illustration of a New Technique. Journal of Educational
Computing Research 28, no. 2 (2003): 10325.
SutcliKe, Allistair. On the EKective Use and Reuse of HCI Knowledge. ACM Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction 7, no. 2 (June 2000): 197221.
Tebeaux, Elizabeth Technical Writing in Seventeenth-Century England: The Flowering of
a Tradition. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 29, no. 3 (1999): 20953.
Tyner, Kathleen. Literacy in A Digital World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1998.
van der Geest, Thea, and Jan Spyridakis. Developing Heuristics for Web Communication:
An Introduction to This Special Issue. Technical Communication Online 47, no. 3
(2000). http://www.techcomm-online.org/issues/v47n3/full/0407.html.
Warschauer, Mark. Electronic Literacies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
Section II
D E S I G N I N Q U I RY
chapter 6
Triangle, Square, Circle:

A Psychological Test
ELLEN LUPTON AND J. ABBOT T MILLER
kandinskys questionnaire, 1923
Profession
Sex
Nationality
For purposes of investigation, the wall-painting workshop requests

solutions to the following problems:
1. Fill in these three forms with the colors yellow, red, and blue.
The coloring is to ll the form entirely in each case.
fig. 1
2. If possible, provide an explanation for your choice of color.
84
In 1923 Wassily Kandinsky circulated a questionnaire at the Bauhaus, asking
respondents to ll in a triangle, square, and circle with the primary colors.
He hoped to discover a universal correspondence between form and
color, embodied in the equation blue=circle, red=square, yellow=triangle.
Kandinsky achieved a remarkable consensus with his questionnaire
in part, perhaps, because others at the school supported his theoretical
ideal. The equation of yellow triangle, red square, and blue circle inspired
numerous projects at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s, including a baby
cradle by Peter Keler and a proposal for a wall mural by Herbert Bayer,
although in later years some members of the Bauhaus dismissed
Kandinskys fascination with these shape and color combinations as
utopian aestheticism.
While few designers today would argue for the universal validity of
such combinations, the attempt to identify the grammar and elements of
a perceptually based language of vision has informed modernist design
education since the 1940s.
In 1990 we recirculated Kandinskys psychological test to
designers, educators, and critics. The replies range from straightforward
attempts to record an intuitive reaction to statements that reject
Kandinskys original project as irrelevant to the aesthetic and social
world of today. Reproduced here are a few of the responses.
85
frances butler
Graphic designer and writer
fig. 2
Delving into the folklore of color and value, I assign colors to the three
shapes in this way:
1. The Triangle = Yellow, because it is the most spiky shape, the least
bulky, the lightest. This shape is the dancer, the sparkler.
2. The Circle = Red, because it is the punctum, the point, the heart of
the matter, and hearts are red. The center, in Western culture, is
the place of vitality, and vitality is bloody.
3. The Square = Blue, or true blue. The stability of the spatialized
consciousness which we have developed since Euclid depends on
the square, in a recessive color, as bets the shape that is the
foundation, the support of all later shapes and ideas.
I do not so much use these shapes as I use the shapes between them,
which are tension-lled and varied, whereas these shapes are quiet and
stable, and therefore inadequate for my communication projects. All of
my projects are designed to exploit the prevailing heteroglossia of
communication today, with overlying fragments of texts from institutional
and personal history forming a layered matrix of partial references and
irony, with the only respite of clarity coming from an occasional eKort to
bare the device supporting the project narrative. In this approach I am
following the notions of Rumelhart and McClelland, described as parallel
cognitive processing, in which all elements of the mind and body
contribute continuously to a cross-grained best-t search which makes
up memory as it goes.
Memories have no locus, and lie within the connections, not in
places, or schemata. Therefore I think that your project to revive this
early-twentieth-centuryor really, late-nineteenth-centuryidea is
an exercise in nostalgic futility. However, these longings are quite
appropriate to our out-of-date culture in which, among other things, the
old men in our government are trying to resume control over the bodies
of young women.
86 DESIGN STUDIES: DESIGN INQUIRY

rosemarie blet ter
Historian of architecture and design
fig. 3
Today Kandinskys association of color and form has purely historical

signicance. While the concern for a reductive universality in the 1920s
is understandable as a response to the technological invasion of
everyday experience, Kandinskys specic reduction of forms to triangle,
square, and circle and to the three primary colors, as well as his attempt
to nd a link between forms and colors, can be understood in terms of an
older Western tradition in geometry and color studies. In a non-Western
context these shapes and colors might have elicited diKerent
associations or might even have been considered meaningless.
Kandinskys forms and colors do not have universal meaning or
correspondence. If one had to identify a form that typies the later
twentieth century in Western culture, it would be the fractal, identied
by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1977. Because of their open-endedness, their
complexity in detail, fractals seem to address the paradox of order
within apparently chaotic situations. Fractals are anything but reductive.
Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, has classied fractals as
postmodern. Fractals are alluded to (at least their property of self-
similarity) in the most recent work of architect Peter Eisenman. They are
also widely applied in computer graphics for commercials. In a loose
sense, self-similarity was a central organizational device in Gothic
architecture.
Since fractals are vaguely reminiscent of the branching logic of
computer programs, and because they were discovered by Mandelbrot
while he worked at IBM, they will undoubtedly seem dated and
associated with current computer culture fty years from now. Like
Kandinskys universal forms, they will become historical artifacts.
LUPTON AND MILLER: TRIANGLE, SQUARE, CIRCLE 87

dean lubensky
Graphic designer
fig. 4
These forms signify:

Empty, unradical, status quo design (Conrans!),
Academic design (they look so college),
Institutionalized Design/Art,
Unapproachability.
Yellow, awkward color;
triangle, awkward shape.
Blue and square seem stable.
Red and circle seem dynamic.
milton glaser
Graphic designer
fig. 5 [All three colors blended within each shape]
First published in Lupton and Miller, eds., The ABCs of Triangle, Square, Circle:
The Bauhaus and Design Theory (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991).

chapter 7
Visual Design of Interactive

Software for Older Adults
ZOE STRICKLER AND PATRICIA NEAFSEY
introduc tion
The question of whether visual information presented over electronic
media can produce greater gains in learning than printed texts alone is at
the center of much contemporary information design research.
Preventing Drug Interactions in Older Adults was a study to determine
whether an interactive, animated software program designed for the needs
of older adults can increase knowledge gains and subsequent behavioral
changes in a representative population of persons aged sixty and older.
An additional goal of the study was to identify specic visual features of
an interface design that may increase older users comprehension and
enjoyment of its content. The ndings from this qualitative pre-study
informed the design of a software program that was later tested in a
clinical trial and was shown to reduce adverse self-medication behaviors
in older adults.1
research objec tives

Before discussing specic ndings from the pre-study, it may be useful
to position them within the goals of the project. The purpose of the
larger study was to develop an eKective intervention for reducing
harmful interactions among prescription and over-the-counter (OTC)
89
drugs and alcohol in older adults living independently in their communities.
The software program designed for the study was used by participants
on laptop computers equipped with infrared sensitive touch screens. No
prior experience with or knowledge of computers was required by the users.
scope of the problem

People over sixty are particularly vulnerable to injury from interactions
that arise from pharmaceuticals taken together and with other common
substances. Members of this age group are likely to use multiple prescription
medications for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and
heart disease, and their drug metabolism rates are more variable than for
members of the general population. They are also less able to hear, read,
and understand oral and written instructions.2 Adverse drug reactions
account for about 17 percent of hospital admissions for the elderly, which
is a rate almost six times greater than for the general population.3 Failing
to take medications properly is estimated to cost the health care system
$25 billion annually, and results in 10 percent of nursing home admissions,
costing $5 billion a year.4 In addition, drug interactions rank between
the fourth to sixth leading cause of death in persons sixty-ve and older.5
study population
The study population for the project was dened as adults at least sixty
years of age by self-report who met criteria developed and validated by
the MacArthur Field Studies of Successful Aging to ensure a base level of
independent physical and cognitive functioning.6 Participants needed to
be living independently in their communities and had to have visual acuity
of at least 20/100 with corrective lenses. In order to qualify for the study,
participants also had to have health conditions that required prescription
drug regimens addressed in the program (that is, they must either use
anticoagulants regularly to reduce stroke risk, or antihypertensives to
control high blood pressure).
phases of the study

The study consisted of two phases. Phase 1, the pilot year, was used for
the creation and testing of the educational software program using
formative research with representative older users. It concluded with a
pilot test of two completed segments of the interactive program with sixty

representative subjects. Phase 2 was a full clinical trial of the completed
program with three hundred subjects in three Connecticut communities.
This paper discusses ndings from the formative research conducted at
the beginning of phase 1 prior to the design of the software program.7
formative research method

The main objective for the formative pre-study was to identify specic
visual, stylistic, verbal, temporal, and navigational features of software
prototypes that promoted (or detracted from) user appeal and
comprehension of program material.
Two focus groups of six volunteers each (three men and nine women)
met once a week over nine weeks to evaluate alternative components of
progressively more completed prototypes. Focus group participants were
recruited from the Center for Learning in Retirement (CLIR), an ongoing
program of lectures, seminars, and workshops at the University of
Connecticut that is attended by more than three hundred older adults from
the surrounding community. Ages of the participants ranged from sixty-
two to eighty-seven, with a mean age of seventy-seven. Participants met
all of the study criteria for subjects in the larger study as described above.
Each was given a $5.00 cash incentive award for each meeting attended.
The nine focus group sessions, which met for one hour each, alternated
weekly between sessions devoted to visual features of software prototypes
and sessions devoted to the language level of the text. The latter were
used to identify vocabulary that participants found digcult to understand.
According to previous research, older adults have been found to
comprehend health information at a full four years below their reading
grade level of non-technical prose.8 We followed recommendations that
the health information be provided at no more than a sixth-grade
reading level,9 and explored particular vocabulary and descriptions of
pharmacological processes with participants to arrive at a nal text for
the printed materials and interactive program. During these sessions
participants also evaluated learner prompts and questions embedded in
the interactive quizzes that followed each section to reinforce learning.10
qualitative study method

The visual sessions employed focus group methodology within a product
testing environment. The purpose of the sessions was not to observe, or
S T R I C K L E R A N D N E A F S E Y: V I S UA L D E S I G N O F I N T E R AC T I V E S O F T WA R E 91
to test participants use of completed prototypes, but rather to elicit
dialogue from them about particular visual and stylistic features of
alternative prototypes prior to design of the actual program. Little has
been written to date about older adults aesthetic preferences for visual
presentation of information. This study is a preliminary eKort to address
this gap in the literature.
The focus groups met in a CLIR seminar room to evaluate elements
of the software prototypes.11 For the visual sessions, participants sat in
a semi-circle around a seventeen-inch Macintosh full-screen display as
prototypes were brought up on the screen for discussion. Since the
participants distance from the screen was greater in the sessions than
would be the case in actual use, the screen presentation during these
presentations was larger to compensate.12
creation of protot ypes

Prior to designing prototypes for the discussion sessions, the research
and design teams reviewed the literature on age-related losses of visual
and physical function in older adults associated with reading and computer
use. Information was available regarding age-related losses in ability to
read printed texts.13 However, somewhat less was available regarding
older adults ability to read, and to learn from, computer screens.14
Specic literature on older adults stylistic and aesthetic preferences for
learning software was not found.15
Given the information available, the design team assumed that a
loss of visual acuity would be present among participants. However, we
also made a conscious eKort to suspend our prior judgments about the
capabilities and preferences of older adults with respect to computer use.
This user population was new to us, and little work has been documented
in this area. We also assumed that any prototypes we created would
reect the aesthetic orientations of our own design educations and
experiences, and considered that these might diKer from preferences
expressed by the study population.16
In order to address these potential sources of bias in our process,
we developed three initial alternative prototypes with diKerent stylistic
features. Our objective was to encourage a compare-and-contrast
discussion environment in the sessions that would require participants
to move beyond simple agrmations of work shown.17 By presenting two

or more options for particular visual features, we created a situation in
which participants would need to articulate specic reasons for preferring
one style or device over another. This approach diKers from product
testing environments where only one completed mock-up of a design is
presented to participants for use and comment. We also chose to
introduce the program in gradually more comprehensive states, beginning
initially with only still images from the animations. This allowed us to
isolate elements participants disliked or found problematic prior to
testing completed (and therefore more digcult to criticize) prototypes.
In the rst session, three still screens from the alternative designs
were presented for discussion (see figs. 13 ). Discussion questions for
this session concerned general aesthetics and legibility of the images,
such as liking or disliking of the illustration style, the gender and race of
the human gure, completeness of the organ set, and preferences for
color scheme, as well as practical matters such as size and typeface of
text blocks. The images were introduced one at a time, each being
discussed to a natural conclusion before another was introduced. The
moderator opened discussion of each new prototype with a general
request for comments on the appearance of the image before asking
more specic, planned questions. The purpose of this approach was to
record rst responses and issues raised from participants points of
view before directing their attention to specic features. Once all three
prototypes had been presented, the conversation owed naturally
toward a compare-and-contrast discussion as participants referred back
to prior images. Conversations were driven by participant-led themes as
much as possible, with the moderator prompting for pre-set questions
only when spontaneous dialogue agged.
In the second visual session, a fourth prototype design was presented
that had been created based on comments from the rst session. The rst
three designs were animated for this session, as was the new design
(again, with clear diKerences in animation features among the prototypes).
In this session matters such as arrangement of headings, images, and text
blocks on the screen, as well as the rate and manner in which kinetic texts
appeared on the screen, were discussed. Stylistic factors were reviewed
and a direction for the nal look of the the program established.
In the last three visual sessions, alternate versions of animations of
diKerent pharmacological processes (and/or interactions) were shown to
fig. 1 Prototype 1
fig. 2 Prototype 2
fig. 3 Prototype 3

determine whether participants could easily comprehend the ideas
being illustrated. All animations in the later sessions featured the visual
prototype style preferred in the rst sessions. Preferences for cueing,
speed, emphasis, and animation devices such as circling body parts
under discussion before zooming to enlargements of internal organs
were discussed.
Alternating the focus groups between language and visual sessions
had two benecial eKects. First, it permitted two weeks time between
visual sessions for the design team to develop new prototypes. Second,
it provided momentum for the participants who had committed to
weekly sessions, but broke the monotony of either type of session. The
participants found the verbal sessions to be more taxing and made
statements to the eKect that they looked forward to the sessions where
they could see movies.
focus group discussion environment

Moderator Neutrality
Prototypes were presented to participants in as neutral and equivalent
a manner as possible. Although the moderator was a member of the
design team, references were made only to the people who are designing
this in order to disassociate the images from the moderator.18 Although
participants were assured that no ones feelings could be hurt, some did
express concern about hurting feelings early in the sessions. Participants
were encouraged to regard all thoughts, whether positive or negative,
as important for the study. We assumed that there would be a tendency
among participants to say polite things, and/or to say what might be
perceived to be the right thing.19 However, in addition to this eKect,
which was present, a great many useful criticisms were made, and
participants were able to express clear dislike for particular features.
Prompting
Comments made in focus group environments have to be evaluated
with regard to the context in which they are made.20 Whether a comment
is oKered spontaneously or has to be prompted by the moderator is
important for understanding its meaning. Comments made without
prompting tend to indicate that a matter is salient (is important to the
participant and comes readily to mind), but also that it is not particularly
sensitive. An issue that must be prompted can either be interpreted as being
less important to the participants (it doesnt occur to them to comment
on it), or it may be a topic that they are uncomfortable discussing in a
group setting.
focus group analysis

All statements made in a focus group environment need to be interpreted
within the framework of the entire conversation. Interpreting motivations
behind comments is subjective and can be a source of error, although
context can provide guidance for assessing the signicance of utterances.
While some responses are obviously richer in detail than others, any single
comment can only be assumed to represent the view of one individual.
Furthermore, any response must be assumed to represent, at least in
part, what an individual wants others in the group to think he or she
believes, not necessarily what he or she actually believes.21 Focus group
conversations can be dominated by one or two talkative individuals, and
this was the case for both groups in the study. The principal speaker in
each group was identied in the transcripts as Participant #1.
Findings
Despite the limitations of what can be rmly asserted from focus group
research, the sessions provided insight into a number of matters related
to the participants responses to the computer program. The participants
spoke openly and matter-of-factly about age-related issues such as
diminished eyesight. They clearly communicated their likes and dislikes
for aspects of graphic style, once prompted. They also talked about their
existing beliefs regarding interactions between prescription and OTC
medications and alcohol, which was useful for identifying points where
misconceptions existed.
What follows is a discussion of the design features of the personal
education program (PEP) that evolved in response to the participants
comments and preferences.
Emotional Tone of the Design

A consideration that guided the creation of the prototypes was that the
behaviors addressed in the program are normative. While older adults use
of OTC medications and alcohol can lead to serious medical complications,

these practices are not aberrant in any way. Active seniors are people
who, in most cases, have been drinking socially and responsibly for
decades and who take aspirin and other OTC medications for headaches
and colds and upset stomach as do other members of the population.
What has changed for older adults as a group is that age-related factors
make some individuals less able to metabolize pharmaceuticals eKectively,
and their greater use of prescription drugs for managing chronic conditions
makes harmful interactions more likely.
The fact that the behaviors that put older adults at risk are normative
suggested a straightforward approach to the content. Comments from
participants supported our decision that elements of persuasion would
be largely unnecessary, and perhaps oK-putting, in the program.
Type Size
Type size was a subject that was mentioned by nearly all participants
without prompting. Individuals were very quick to say that type was too
small, or that they had trouble reading it. Participants regarded most of
the initial text settings presented to be too small. This is consistent with
research on eyesight and aging that suggests that older adults need
larger type sizes than younger readers to read text comfortably.22 The
design team was familiar with this literature, but it is signicant that the
bias toward smaller type and generous compositional white space
prevalent in design culture and education manifested itself in our initial
prototypes despite this preparation.23 Participants in both focus groups
(identied as members of either group A or B, and by the number
assigned to them during transcript analysis)24 expressed annoyance that
available space was not used for making type larger.
A.3: Maybe you could enlarge that [text] slightly.
A.4: Large type. Yeah, larger type helps.
A.2: You got a lotta room there.
B.2: Its hard to read.
B.4: The print could be a little bit larger.
B.5: There is plenty of room there.
Type Style and Character

Unlike type size, comments about type style had to be prompted. A
simple explanation for this is that people who are not trained in typographic
detailing do not view type variables with as much interest as communication
designers. However, style is also a matter of taste, and some members
may have felt uncomfortable talking about aesthetics in a group setting,
especially if they felt they knew little about type or graphic style.
While comments about type characteristics were not oKered
spontaneously in most cases, type style did have salience for the
participants. Once opinions were voiced, they were strong. Participants
generally lacked a vocabulary to discuss type features, but their
comments are revealing.
A.1: Oh I like it. Its easy to see. I dont like the curlicue kind
[serif faces]. I like the, uh . . . [participant doesnt have a word
to describe sans serif].
A.2: Block letters.
A.1: Block letters! Yes, I like that much better. Its easy to read.
Thats what were accustomed to readingwe read the
newspaper and you dont have too much curlicues. You have it
much more block letters.
The design teams prediction that older individuals would be more
comfortable with serif type faces than sans-serif faces was not supported.
Since all texts in the PEP were written to be brief and to read like display
type, the participants expressed unanimous25 preference for the use of
all Stone Sans Bold type in the third prototype. This is not surprising, as
Stone Sans was designed, in part, for readable screen display.
The nal design employed 20-point Stone Sans Bold for text type,
and 28-point and 32-point Stone Sans Bold for headings as created for a
640x480-pixel screen display. Some tertiary labels, such as generic
names of pharmaceuticals, were presented in 18-point size, but the
preferred minimum type size for the program was 20 points.
All type had to be bold to be read comfortably by the participants.
This eliminated weight change as a variable, so type size and position in
space became the principal means for text diKerentiation. Body text
was set ush left/ragged right, and set in small blocks of text for rapid
reading. Line lengths were typically two to four words in length. The
longest block of continuous text was ve lines. Texts were written for
this presentation format and were tested to maximize clarity and brevity.
Participants were also sensitive to capitalization. They were
disturbed by headings that were all lowercase or employed only one cap

at the beginning of a line with subsequent words being all lowercase.
Here, the modernist preference for a limited use of capitals was in
conict with their expectation that headings should employ initial
capitals throughout.26 Comments on capitalization were unprompted.
A.5: I think the capitals help out [initial capitals in heads],
where you dont have them there [in gure 1].
B.1: And the capital A on the antihypertensives seems to make
more emphasis on it. The little a . . .
Participants also expressed strong interest in seeing particular words
in the text emphasized. However, because text was already set bold,
increasing weights for emphasis was unpleasant. Participants had
digculty perceiving words set oblique, and they could not distinguish
color changes in the text well, a nding consistent with a research
demonstrating loss of color perception with age.27 However, participants
indicated that they wanted to see key words underlined for emphasis.
This contradicts ne typographic traditions, but it reects participants
comfort with typewriter conventions, as was expressed in the comment,
Were used to seeing it [type] underlined. The decision to underline
for emphasis is partially supported by empirical research.28
Contrast
The issue that elicited the greatest number of spontaneous comments
was contrast. All initial prototypes were found to lack sugcient contrast.
This is consistent with studies suggesting that the ability to perceive
light/dark and color contrasts diminishes with age.29
The illustration style of gure 1 caused basic contrast problems
for participants. It denes the contours of the human gure with a
gradation of neutral color to imply volume. Digculty discriminating low-
contrast edges of shapes is a visual decit associated with aging,30 and
several participants found the smooth transitions from gray to white to
be indistinct.
Older viewers needs for strong contrast in imagery also contradicts
an emphasis in conventional color theory education for designers on
reducing contrasts of hue to achieve harmonious color composition.31 As
with the use of small type sizes, this bias toward working with hues
similar in value and/or graying back color contrasts can amount to
illegibility for older audiences.
The imagery with which we were workingan anatomical gure
displaying internal organsrequired some means of diKerentiating
contiguous shapes. Contrasts of hue alone, as presented in gure 2, were
not sugcient for a number of the participants. One of the more descriptive
speeches regarding gure 2 indicated the seriousness of the contrast
issue for older viewers.
A.1: Yes, it seems too light to me, the pill. I mean, you might
think that was just a distortion on the picture, rather thanif it
didnt have blood pressure pill written under it, Id think it
was something else.
When a comment that an image is too light is made in a vague way, it
is possible to regard it as a matter of taste or degree. However, when
a viewer describes an important component of an image as looking like a
distortion on the picture, quite a bit more is at stake.
Figure 3 was regarded unanimously as the easiest gure to see, but
it too was found to lack sugcient contrast. Figure 3 employs a dark
outline of a consistent weight around the gure and all organs.
Participants regarded the outline as too thin in the rst protoype, and
also insugciently dark against a colored background, but comments
were consistently supportive of the illustrative approach.
A.3: I like this one the best. Its easier to see, but the size of the
type . . . It hits you, and thats what youre interested in.
A.5: The pill stands out there.
A.1: I like the looks of the graphics . . .
Weakened color perception appeared to exacerbate digculty with edge
discrimination as well. Participant #5 in group B had digculty distinguishing
between hues close in value, and on several occasions referred to
elements, particularly colored type, as being shaded, or commenting
it blends.
In gure 3, text was rendered not as black but in two huesa dark
teal and a dark red-brown. Comments from the rst visual session with
group B reveal how subtle color diKerentiations of this sort are perceived,
or not perceived, by older users.
B.4: Well, I think the red emphasizes that its antihypertension.
B.5: I thought that was black, is that red?
B.4: No, brown-red.
B.3: The box is red.

B.2: This is red too, the antihypertension is red.
B.5: I didnt even notice it.
B.3: I do think black print would be easier to read.
In subsequent prototypes the type was rendered in darker values but
retained a slight diKerentiation in hue. Pure black type was avoided
because it introduced a visual harshness to the screens, but the nal color
values were nearly black. For participants who could see color distinctions
in the type, this provided an additional level of hierarchy. For those with
less ability to distinguish hue, all type appeared black.
Glare
Despite the participants expressed need for sugcient contrast on the
screen, particularly for texts, we found that the matter is not as simple as
black type on white ground. As soon as participants in both groups saw
gure 3 presented on a warm blue background they expressed a preference
for the colored background because it reduced glare on the screen.
A.1: And you know that if youre going to be in facilities with
lights like these, orescents, it [this screen design] doesnt
show as much glare as either of the others. It tends to be much
better . . . it seems to kinda settle things down as far as the
light reections.
This nding is consistent with literature on older adults high sensitivity
to glare.32 Because the iris and pupil undergo change with age, older
adults experience reduced ability to adjust to intense light sources.
The issue of glare did not come up during discussions of the rst
gures. However, once it was introduced, the blue eld was unanimously
preferred to a white background in unprompted comments. This
suggests that designing eKective screen images for older viewers may
involve nding a balance between the need for strong contrasts in the
imagery and reduced glare on the screen overall.
Light warm blue was selected as the background color for several
reasons. Older adults have the greatest digculty distinguishing hues of
similar value in the shorter (blue and green) wavelengths.33 By using blue
as the background hue, other visual elements such as esh, organs, and
cues could be diKerentiated in the red, pink, orange, and brown range.
The blue background also made the esh colors of the anatomical gure
appear warmer and healthier. Some research has also suggested that
blue is the color most often identied by older adults as their favorite
color.34 Its use as the dominant hue on the screen may, therefore,
enhance the appeal of the program for some viewers.
Participants preferred a plain background of a single hue, light in
value. They regarded all shaded bars, layers, or other devices that
segmented areas of the screen or separated text from image to be
distracting, and as interfering with comprehension of the information.
Illustration Style of Anatomical Figures

Figure 1
As discussed in the section on contrast, gure 1 employed a technique
for dening the contours of the gure and organs with a smooth
gradation. This was intended to give the gure volume, and presumably
a more natural appearance. In this respect it could also be said to be the
most visually sophisticated rendering style presented. Figure 1 also used
a more traditional medical illustration style. The pose was taken from an
anatomy text with body face-on and head in prole. In order to avoid
racial implications, the gure was not given a skin color. Rather, the edge
gradation was a warm gray and emphasis was on the interior of the body
instead of on surface esh.
Figure 1 was also designed to represent an older person. It had a
larger, mature nose, and the body shape was of an older, formerly t man
with some muscle loss. The gure had no hair.
Participants did not like this gure. As mentioned above, the
gradation was hard for some in the group to see. Participants expressed
that the gure looked old, and they did not nd this appealing. They
also expressed discomfort with the partial prole stance, a position that
seemed unnatural to them. The absence of facial features was also
perceived to be impersonal. Participants only mentioned the unnaturalness
of the position, the lack of facial features, the oldness, maleness, and
baldness of the gure when prompted, but it is also possible that rather
than looking lifelike or sophisticated in its rendering, the gradation and
neutral colors caused participants to perceive the gure as machinelike,
or worse, cadaverlike. Dislike of this gure was unanimous.

Figure 2
Figure 2 was rendered in a much more diagrammatic style. The objective
for Figure 2 was to make the anatomical gure more simplied and
geometric in its shapes at the expense of naturalness. The gure and
organs were presented as at planes of color against a white ground. Of
the three gures, gure 2 had the least contrast.
In spite of the overall lightness and low contrast of the image
(points which were made repeatedly in unprompted comments), the
style of gure 2 was much preferred by participants over gure 1. Figure
2 was unanimously perceived to be female, and the facial features and
hair were mentioned as principal reasons for its greater appeal. The
gure was entirely face-on, which was preferred to the partial prole of
the rst image. The body shape was also rounder, implying the presence
of some body fat, and its simplied facial features had a youthful
appearance, although the presumed age of the gure was not mentioned.
The image was colorful (mainly pinks, oranges, and light blues). In order
to distinguish the organs from one another diagrammatically, some were
assigned unnatural hues; for instance, the stomach was rendered as a
sky blue. Participants did not express discomfort with the abstraction of
the color scheme. They appeared to accept it as symbolic.
A.5: Its showing the heart, which I think is important.
A.1: And the kidneys, and the pancreas, and whatever that is
the stomach or the pancreas[the] stomach is blue.
Figure 3
While gure 2 was generally preferred over gure 1, both groups expressed
a unanimous preference for the graphic style of gure 3. Like gure 2, it was
colorful and at, with principal diKerences being its colored background
(light, warm blue/gray) and dark outlines around the body contour and
organs. Although diagrammatic, gure 3 was also rendered more
descriptively than gure 2 in terms of denition of facial features and organs.
A.1: But this is a nice gure. It looks more like a human, too,
you know.
Figure 3 was criticized for being too light in value, and for lacking
contrasts. However, once the contours were thickened and darkened,
participants in both groups expressed satisfaction with the style solution
and did not want to see the other gures again, even with new variations.
Representation of the Figure
One of the goals for design was to create an anatomical gure that
was gender- and race-neutral (fig. 4 ). We were only partly successful in
achieving this end.
Comments about racial and gender characteristics of the gures
had to be prompted by the moderator in all cases. Several explanations
for this are possible. First, participants may not have thought about
representation until asked to comment on it, or such features may not
have seemed important to them given the informational purpose of the
program. However, race and gender are relatively sensitive issues in
American culture, and participants may have been reluctant to discuss
their perceptions publicly. Most of the joking in the sessions occurred
during these conversations, and prompted discussions of identity tended
to be cut oK rather quickly by someone raising another, usually more
technical, issue.
Agreement was unanimous in both groups that gure 1 appeared
to be male in its body shape and features, and gure 2 was perceived
unanimously to be female. Figure 3 was discussed in Group A as
appearing more gender neutral.
A.1: It looks like a person. Its a human bodyan it.
A.5: Essentially, a generic person.
Group B, a group of all women, expressed concern that gure 3 appeared
to be a white male, although it did have some features they regarded as
ambiguous.
fig. 4 Screen sample from the nal interface design showing one of six ethnic gures

B.1: It looks like a male to me.
B.2: It looks like a male.
B.1: But if the hair was removed it would look sort of non-gender.
B.2: Um-hmm.
B.5: You want it without hair?
B.1: . . . but you know, people get all bent out of shape if they
identify a male, instead of a femalethe shape of the head [on
this one], they wouldnt know which it was.
Both groups also made comments that were dismissive of the signicance
of gender and identity features at all.
A.2: It doesnt matter what it looks like.
B.3: What are we supposed to be looking for?
B.2: Thats what Im saying, what is there in the gure there?
B.1: I dont think it would make any diKerence, would it, male
or female?
B.5: I cant tell a male from a female anymore anyway.
It is impossible to know for certain whether these comments reect
genuine beliefs (that the features of a gure do not inuence a viewers
perception), or whether the comments imply unease with the questions.
What can be determined from the transcripts is that, despite these
comments, some diversity consciousness was present in the participants,
and at least publicly, this group of older, white adults wanted the
program to express some values of inclusiveness.
For subsequent sessions, gure 3 was reworked to blend male and
female features to a greater extent. Race proved to be a more digcult
area for achieving perceptions of ambiguity. We found that very slight
diKerences in line direction, length, and shape produce racial associations
in even simplied images. After the focus group sessions were concluded
and nal production was begun, we made the decision to create a series
of six gures that reected diKerent racial variations. Some of the gures
appeared to be more male, others more female. In the context of the
completed program, mixing up the appearance of the gures helped to
break the monotony of the similarly formatted frames. Thus, for each of
the four health categorieshigh blood pressure, blood thinners, upset
stomach, and pain reliefve to eight diKerent animations were presented
with diKerent racial features dispersed among the gures. This reinforces
the message that all groups suKer from common drug interactions.
completeness of organs in the anatomical figure
Another matter tested was the anatomical completeness of the human
gurewhether participants preferred seeing only the system under
discussion in a particular animation, or whether they wanted to see a more
complete set of organs at all times. We expected participants to prefer a
simplied presentation, but we found just the opposite (figs. 5 and 6 ).
The rst topic discussed was blood pressure, so we presented
gure 1 showing only the circulatory system. Figure 2 displayed some
additional organs, including the brain, stomach, and kidneys. Figure 3
showed kidneys, stomach, and a simplied digestive tract. The matter
did not have to be prompted. Soon after gure 2 was displayed, both
fig. 5 Screen sample from nal interface design showing one of six ethnic gures
fig. 6 Screen sample from nal interface showing zoomed anatomical detail

groups mentioned that they preferred seeing the more complete organ
set. Their desire to understand drug side eKects was fairly keen, and
they wanted to be able to see in the animation if a drug aKected any
vital organs, particularly the brain. Comments about the brain arose
spontaneously throughout the discussions.
A.1: I like the one [#2] that shows it goes up to the headI like
that part, because it does go up to the headto show that it
does go all to the whole body.
A.2: . . . this oneyou can see more veins in his head.
A.4: . . . I like to have more.
A.2: You want to have guts in there?
A.4: Yes.
A.1: Yeah, I want guts too, guts and veins, and goin up into the
head, and the works!
B.2: But it does show where most of the organs are located.
B.1: Now will any of the things [pharmaceuticals] identify the
brain itself, any eKect on the brain?
M: Some of the animations will. What do you think about seeing
the brain?
B.1: Well, Id like to see it there, if some of the things are going
to aKect it. The other one didnt really have any [gure 1 did
not have a brain].
Although the participants did not mention reasons for wanting to see
the brain, their motivations are easy to understand. Many medications
can cause temporary mental dulling, drowsiness, or disorientation.
Active older adults particularly fear these conditions, as they can lead to
incidents that result in loss of independence. Stroke is also a primary
health concern of older adults, as one stroke can quickly lead to
permanent losses of mental functioning and independence.
Information Hierarchy
Standard conventions for information hierarchy and placement of
elements on the page were preferred over the non-standard variations
tested. Participants wanted to begin reading from left to right, and once
they were at the right they wanted to be able to stay there.
A.5: Where they have it [body text on right] here now. You can
just drop down and read it.
fig. 7 Screen sample from nal interface showing zoomed anatomical detail
They did not want to have to scan the eld for new information and did
not like typographic elements too dispersed on the page (fig. 7 ).
B.5: The type is . . .
B.4: Its like youve got it all over.
Interaction Design
Standard conventions for interaction design were also preferred (fig. 8 ).
Some basic functions were tested by intentionally using non-standard
relationships (for instance, on some prototypes, forward and back positions
were reversed in the menu bar from their relationships on standard
electronic equipment). It was clear that the older adults in the groups
were familiar with the operation of home VCR equipment, and they
expected the interactive program to follow VCR conventions. Several of the
participants had home computers, and a few used the internet regularly.
Those with internet experience expected the program to work like the
internet. Others had little experience with computers and/or interactive
environments, but VCR controls were assumed by the participants to be
natural standards upon which the interface should be based.
Participants strongly preferred prototypes that contained graphical
cues over those that did not. They wanted to see a bright red arrow
appear on the screen every time a new block of text appeared to direct
their attention to it. They tended not to notice changes in the text that
were not cued. Areas of the body that were under discussion in the text
were circled dynamically in bright red. Some of these circles then

fig. 8 Screen sample from nal interface showing the rst menu page
zoomed out to ll the screen when a microscopic pharmacological

interaction was to be animated.
Interactive functions were kept to a minimum to reduce navigation
confusion. During the pilot test it became clear that some users with less
mental and perceptual functioning needed to be able to proceed through
the program in a strictly linear way. For these users the interactive script
was written so that they could advance through the entire program by
simply touching the next button at the bottom of the screen after each
segment. Other users with higher levels of functioning and more
experience with computers wanted a second level of interactivity so that
they could make selections by touching active areas of the screen as
they might use the internet. The nal program used in the clinical trial
employs both levels of interactivity.
Bifocal Corrective Lenses

Early in the sessions it became clear that the use of bifocal eyeglasses
created problems for some users, and that use of bifocals by users would
have to be assumed to be a condition for use. In the focus group
environment, the display eld was a seventeen-inch, vertical computer
monitor. Participants wearing bifocals had to adjust their head positions
frequently and uncomfortably to read the screen through the reading
lens in the lower half of their glasses. For the pilot test, the program was
transferred to laptop computers equipped with touch screens. The problem
was largely eliminated because of the more natural reading position.
Standard interaction design protocol tends to recommend
positioning menus at the top of a screen. In our laptop touch-screen
environment, we placed the menu at the bottom of the screen so that
users wearing bifocals would be able to focus on these selections more
easily and with less head adjustment. This location is also consistent
with conventions that position next or for more information buttons
at the bottom center or bottom right corners of a screen.35
Sound
A decision was made early on not to use sound in the program, as it
has been reported that older users, unlike younger users, nd computer
programs more digcult to use when exposed to sounds.36
Motion
Design of motion for older adults must be slower and more consecutive
than moving graphics for younger audiences. Whereas younger people
may enjoy the aesthetic experience of seeing multiple events occur
simultaneously on a screen, our participants found simultaneous events
frustrating. This is fully consistent with studies of older adults and
motion phenomena. Perception research consistently demonstrates that
visual tracking skills diminish with age.37
From our sessions we determined that only one important event
involving motion could happen at a time. A detail area could zoom large
while other elements faded (and this particular example of simultaneity
was preferred over two-step zooms), but events involving program
content needed to be sequential. The base transition time for events was
at least three seconds in duration for the viewer, with ve seconds being
standard. Two to three lines of text (six to eight words) required a
minimum of ve seconds of display for comprehension, and texts of up
to six lines required ten seconds. Important texts were generally
displayed for at least ten seconds.
The actual playing time of a computer animation will vary
depending on the speed of the computer on which it is played and other
factors such as available memory. Given this changeable environment,
we tested the animations with focus group participants by looking for a
base number of seconds to be allowed for diKerent kinds of transitions.
Animations produced on diKerent machines could then be slowed down

or sped up within the Macromedia AuthorWare program to play at
appropriate speeds on the laptop computers.
Not surprisingly, younger individuals have tended to perceive that
the animations move too slowly. Nursing students being trained to
deliver the program to older adults in the home trial were frustrated by
the pace and often suggested that A could happen while B is
transitioning . . . , or the like. However, older learners clearly need a
greatly reduced motion environment for comprehension.
generalizabilit y
The ndings reported above are specic to the program developed for
this project. However, one of the striking things about the project was
that nearly all of the relevant resources we found noted the small amount
of empirical research available in the area of older adults preferences
and requirements for computer interface design. Because focus group
studies are not generalizable to a larger public (due to their small sample
sizes), the ndings reported here can only be assumed to represent the
contributions of twelve individuals. Nevertheless, we hope that this
report may provide a needed starting point for others intending to design
interactive materials for older adults in the near future, and that it may
stimulate further research into the aesthetic preferences and practical
thresholds required by older adults for visual, online learning materials.
conclusion
People over age sixty are particularly vulnerable to injury from
interactions among prescription and OTC medications and alcohol. This
study is an eKort to create an eKective interactive software intervention
to reduce the risk of certain harmful interactions in a representative
population of independently living seniors.
Findings drawn from the qualitative pre-study, conducted to guide
the design of the software prototype, suggest that particular visual
features of interface design may enhance comprehension, appeal, and
ease of use in such a program for older adults. Specically, interrelated
visual factors such as use of bold typefaces in sizes of 18 points or larger,
strong contrasts for type values, use of bold, descriptive outlines in
illustrations, as well as a simplied and glare-reducing background, may
enhance the appeal of the program for older users and may mean the
diKerence between legibility and illegibility for some. Animated
components of such a program need to play at slower speeds than might
be preferred by younger people. Strong visual cueing and clear, simple
navigation functions are especially important to this population. In
addition, we learned that older adults will express clear preferences for
particular approaches to illustration style, typography, and representation
of the human gure if presented with alternative prototypes. Some of
the preferences expressed by participants in this study contradict
standards of aesthetics and stylistic orientations commonly taught in
design education programs in the U.S.
It is our hope that the above ndings, and others, may be pursued
and conrmed in subsequent studies to extend the knowledge base
available to designers and software developers regarding design of
interactive educational media for the growing population of older adults
in the U.S. and abroad.
First published in Visible Language 36, no. 1 (2002).

the research team
The research team for this project reected the multidisciplinary nature of the problem.
Patricia Neafsey, Ph.D. (pharmacology), led the project as principal investigator. Design
collaborator, Zoe Strickler, M.Des. (visual communication design), directed the visual
communication research, and design and production of the animations. Collaborators
Robin H. Froman, Ph.D. (educational psychology), and Steven V. Owen , Ph.D.
(educational psychology), provided guidance for development of the measurement
instruments and contributed statistical analysis for the clinical trial. Assistant Professor
of Nursing Juliette Shelman, assisted by honors nursing student Antoinette Padula, led
the qualitative language prestudy for design of measurement instruments and the
program. Design students Michael Skiles and Mai Phung contributed design of prototypes
for the formative research phase. Production assistance for segments of the PEP was
provided by design students Amy Ellingham, Sam Kim, and Meena Stout.
notes
1. Results from the clinical trial were reported in Patricia J. Neafsey, et al., An
Interactive Technology Approach to Educate Older Adults about Drug Interactions
Arising from Over-the-counter Self-medication Practices, Public Health Nursing 19,
no. 4 (2002): 25562.
2. JeK A. Bloom, et al., Potentially Undesirable Prescribing and Drug Use among the
Elderly, Canadian Family Physician 39 (1993): 233745; Joseph T. Hanlon, et al.,
Drug-use Patterns among Black and Nonblack Community Dwelling Elderly, The
Annals of Pharmacotherapy 26 (1992): 69785; Rachel L. Pollow, et al., Drug
Combinations and Potential for Risk of Adverse Drug Reaction among
Community-dwelling Elderly, Nursing Research 43, no. 1 (1994): 4449; Carl
Salzman, Medication Compliance in the Elderly, Journal of Clinical Psychology 56,
supplement 1 (1995): 1822.
3. United States General Accounting Ogce, Prescription Drugs and the Elderly
(GA/HEHS-95-152). (Gaithersburg, MD: U.S. General Accounting Ogce, 1995).
4. The Taskforce for Compliance. Noncompliance with Medications: An Economic
Tragedy with Important Implications for Health Care Reform (Baltimore: The
Taskforce for Compliance, 1994); Jason Lazarou, Bruce H. Pomeranz, and Paul N.
Corey, Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients, Journal of
the American Medical Association 279 (1998): 12001205.
5. Lazarou, Pomeranz, and Corey, Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospital
Patients.
6. Sharon M. Wallsten, et al., Medication Taking Behaviors in the High- and Low-
functioning Elderly: MacArthur Field Studies of Successful Aging, Annals of
Pharmacotherapy 29 (1995): 35964.
7. Results from the pilot test and a description of the study plan for the clinical trial
are reported in Patricia J. Neafsey, et al., Use of Touchscreen Equipped Computers
to Deliver Health Information about Self-medication to Older Adults, Journal of
Gerontological Nursing 27, no. 11 (2001): 1927; Neafsey, et. al., An Interactive
Technology Approach, 25562.
8. Mark V. Williams, et al., Inadequate Functional Health Literacy among Patients at
Two Public Hospitals, Journal of the American Medical Association 274 (1995): 167782.
9. Robert Laubach and Kay Koschnick, Using Readability Formulas for Easy Adult
Materials (Syracuse: New Readers Press, 1977); Sue Plimpton and Jane H. Root,
Materials Strategies that Work in Low Literacy Health Communication, Public
Health Reports 109 (1994): 8692; Williams, et al., Inadequate Functional Health
Literacy.
10. Method for the language sessions is reported in Neafsey, et al., An Interactive
Technology Approach.
11. The focus group methods of Linda Anderson and colleagues and Richard Krueger
were adapted to a computer product environment. See Linda A. Anderson, et al.,
Using Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Pretest the Publication Take
Charge of Your Diabetes: A Guide for Care, Diabetes Educator 22, no. 6 (1996):
598604; and Richard A. Krueger, Quality Control in Focus Group Research, in
David. L. Morgan, ed., Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State of the Art
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 6585.
12. The nal image size for the program was twelve inches on fourteen-inch IBM
Thinkpad laptop computers, with one inch of perimeter space lost to the
touchscreen attachment. Final alterations were made to the software program
based on observations of sixty subjects during the pilot test prior to its use in the
clinical trial.
13. Roger Morrell and Katrina V. Echt, Designing Written Instructions for Older
Adults: Learning to Use Computers, in Arthur D. Fisk and Wendy A. Rogers, eds.,
Handbook of Human Factors and the Older Adult (New York: Academic Press, 1997),
33561; James M. Vanderplas and Jean H. Vanderplas, Some Factors AKecting
Legibility of Printed Materials for Older Adults, Perceptual and Motor Skills 50
(1980): 92332.
14. J. Morgan Morris, User Interface Design for Older Adults, Interacting with
Computers 6, no. 4 (1994): 37393.
15. In Dynamics in Document Design (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), Karen A.
Schriver noted that little work has assessed the design of hardcopy or online
information for this population [older adults], and . . . surprisingly, there are
almost no studies of elderly readers in the document design literature (507).
16. For a discussion of sources of bias in design education, see Dietmar Winkler,
Design Practice and Education: Moving beyond the Bauhaus Model, in Jorge
Frascara, User-centered Design: Mass Communications and Social Change (London:
Taylor & Francis, 1997).
17. David Sless discusses the digculty that people often have articulating their
impressions of the visual features of products. He writes, They make comments
about the improved versions, such as it looks professional, its easy to read, or
its nice to look at which gives a sense of something underlying what is
articulated. Sless, Better Information Presentation: Satisfying Consumers?
Visible Language 30, no. 3 (1996): 259. We hoped to generate a more explicit and
actionable dialogue in our sessions through compare-and-contrast discussion.
18. Ibid., 24667.

19. David L. Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1988).
20. Terrence L. Albrecht, Gerianne M. Johnson, and Joseph B. Walther, Understanding
Communication Processes in Focus Groups, in Morgan, ed., Successful Focus
Groups, 5164.
21. Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research.
22. Morrell and Echt, Designing Written Instructions for Older Adults; Vanderplas
and Vanderplas, Some Factors AKecting Legibility.
23. The imperative of dynamic white space in composition as taught at the Bauhaus
and as discussed by Jan Tschichold in Die neue Typographie, 1928 (published in
English in 1995 as The New Typography with translation by Ruari McLean [Berkeley:
University of California Press]) had tremendous inuence during the twentieth
century on the assumptions designers bring to tasks involving typography. The
high value placed on dynamic page composition in graphic design education and
practice has biased designers toward use of smaller type faces as a means of
preserving white space and creating ner textures in settings of text. This
orientation is at odds with older adults requirements for information retrieval
generally, but it is especially problematic in computer environments where screen
space is limited.
24. In the rst two visual sessions from which most of the comments reported here
were drawn, only ve participants were present in each group.
25. The word unanimous is used in this paper when a majority of the participants in
both groups expressed verbal agreement with an idea and no opposition was
voiced. However, because of the social aspects of the group environment, it has to
be assumed some opposing views may have gone unvoiced.
26. Tschicholds discussion of capitalization in The New Typography, page 78, is
characteristic of the modernist preference for lowercase headings.
27. Donald W. Kline and Frank Schieber, Vision and Aging, in James E. Birren and K.
Warner Schaie, eds., Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, 2nd ed. (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1985), 296331; Morris, User Interface Design for Older
Adults.
28. Harvey A. Taub, Underlining of Prose Material for Elderly Adults, Educational
Gerontology 10 (1984): 40105.
29. Donald W. Kline and Charles T. Scialfa, Sensory and Perceptual Functioning: Basic
Research and Human Factors Implications, in Arthur D. Fisk and William A.
Rogers, eds., Handbook of Human Factors and the Older Adult (New York: Academic
Press, 1997), 2754; Neil Charness and Elizabeth A. Bosman, Human Factors and
Aging, in Fergus I. M. Craik and Timothy A. Salthouse, eds., The Handbook of Aging
and Cognition (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1992), 495551.
30. Morrell and Echt, Designing Written Instructions for Older Adults.
31. In A Primer of Visual Literacy, 8th ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), Donis A.
Dondis uses rhetoric inherited from Bauhaus masters Josef Albers and Johannes
Itten to discuss color contrasts. Saturated color is simple, almost primitive, and
always given preference by folk artists and children . . . the less saturated colors
reach toward neutrality of color, even non-color, and are subtle and restful. The
eKect of this pedagogy, although useful for understanding color harmonies, has
produced an orientation among designers to use subtle color contrasts that may
be digcult for older adults to discriminate.
32. Kline and Schieber, Vision and Aging; Kline and Scialfa, Sensory and Perceptual
Functioning.
33. Kline and Scialfa, Sensory and Perceptual Functioning; Morris, User Interface
Design for Older Adults.
34. N. Clayton Silver and Rozana Ferrante, Sex DiKerences in Color Preferences
among an Elderly Sample, Perceptual and Motor Skills 80, no. 1 (1995): 92022.
35. Ray Kristof and Amy Satran, Interactivity by Design: Creating and Communicating
with New Media (Mountain View, CA: Adobe Press, 1995).
36. Jakob Nielsen and Lynn Sheafer, Sound EKects as an Interface Element for Older
Users, Behavioral Information Technology 12 (1993): 20815.
37. Kline and Scialfa, Sensory and Perceptual Functioning; Morris, User Interface
Design for Older Adults.

chapter 8
Sharpening Ones Axe: Making

a Case for a Comprehensive
Approach to Research in the
Graphic Design Process
PAUL J. NINI
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, Id spend six sharpening

my axe. abraham lincoln
Mr. Lincolns advice is, of course, very good, and applicable to many
pursuits. Yet many graphic design practitioners and students often
routinely ignore this sentiment and dive directly into form-making
activities when presented with a design problem. In most cases we tend
to rely on intuition and our best guess to construct a solution, without
the benet of the various types of research that might provide a clearer
insight as to how our eKorts might be more eKectively directed. Our
profession might be characterized, if you will, as swinging a dull axe.
However, there are some basic steps that we can take to remedy
this situation. Graphic designers can work with clients, viewers, and
other stakeholders to identify and analyze problems. We can also include
those individuals in the process of generating design concepts, evaluating
prototypes, and experiencing produced solutions. We can use research
techniques that allow us to solicit opinions, observe behavior, or even
allow viewers to participate in developing ideas. In short, we can move
toward a design process that incorporates input from those involved,
and that results in designed communications that more eKectively meet
viewer needs and expectations.
117
Such an approach results from a view of design as a problem-solving
activityas opposed to a view that primarily stresses self-expression.
A number of the research activities employed are viewer-centered,
requiring the direct involvement of members of user or audience groups
for whom the communication is intended. Both quantitative and
qualitative research methods are used, as would be appropriate to the
particular design problem, sometimes combined within a single research
activity. The terms audience and user are used to denote two slightly
diKerent meanings: audiences are generally considered to be larger
groups of viewers, and the research methods discussed in regard to
audience-centered projects are mostly perceptual in nature (such as
measuring impressions of trademark concepts); on the other hand, users
are often considered to be smaller groups of viewers, and the research
methods discussed in regard to user-centered projects are mostly
performance-based (such as measuring a users ability to locate a
destination via viewing existing signage in an environment).
creating a model of the design process

While every designers approach to designing diKers somewhat, it is
possible to construct a model of the design process that includes the
basic tasks and activities involved. The model described in gure 1 is
represented in a linear fashion, as earlier steps often precede later ones.
We all know, however, that real life is often not so neatly organized, and
that the particular path we might take on a given project may vary from
that presented here. The main value of a process model, therefore, is
its ability to act as a kind of guide to our eKorts, allowing us to tailor it
to the needs of the project at hand.
fig. 1 The basic steps of the design process

fig. 2 Typical activities during the design process
The basic design process can be broken into two distinct phases.
The rst is devoted to the investigation of the design problem and the
creation of strategies to address the specic issues found, while the
second is devoted to developing design concepts and further rened
prototypes and solutions. Concurrent with each stage of development in
the second phase are iterative rounds of user or audience testing, which
allow specic improvements to be made prior to implementation. At this
point it is also possible for the entire process to begin again, as user or
audience testing after introduction of the communication may reveal
possibilities for further generations or editions.
Activities typical to each phase include an audit of competing or
similar design eKorts, and the creation of desirable attributes for the
designed communications (fig. 2 ). A better awareness of the state of the
art is achieved through the rst activity, while the second can supply
agreed-upon criteria for eventual testing in phase two. Users and audience
members can then provide input into the organization of content and
basic visual approach of design concepts, while also providing evaluation
of design prototypes for further renement and development, and
experience using nal communications after their introduction.
Finally, it is also helpful to consider the three main methods for
conducting user or audience research as part of the design process
(fig. 3 ). Survey research can be used to determine impressions concerning
various aspects of designed communications, while behavioral research
can provide insight through the observation of users actions. Participatory
NINI: SHARPENING ONES AXE 119

fig. 3 The three main methods for conducting research with viewers
research can allow for a partnering with users to create communications

that meet specic needs for particular contexts.
using the design process model as a planning tool

The complete process model as shown above can also be used as a tool to
plan specic research activities for most types of visual communication
design projects. While almost all projects will require the basic steps
outlined in phase one, diKerent types of user or audience research would be
employed elsewhere in the process, depending on the nature of the project.
By using the model to consider all possible combinations of research
methods, specic user and audience research plans can be created as
needed. Figure 4 is an example of a research plan specic to corporate
identication design. As a primary goal of this type of project is to create
a particular impression in the minds of audience members, it is
appropriate that survey research tools be mainly used to gauge the success
of both existing and proposed design eKorts.
Notice the similarities of the next two individual research plans,
created for interaction and interface design projects and environmental

fig. 4 An audience research plan for corporate identication design
fig. 5 A user research plan for interaction and interface design
fig. 6 A user research plan for environmental graphics and waynding design
graphic and waynding design projects, respectively (figs. 5 and 6 ). As

both types of projects mainly concern users navigating space (whether
virtual or physical), it is appropriate that behavioral research be the
predominant method used. The nal research plan, created for task-
oriented information design projects, uses all three audience and user
research methods, due to the potentially more complex nature of the
problem and the need to work more closely with the user group throughout
the design process (fig. 7 ).
Not all user and audience research methods are appropriate or
eKective for all types of graphic design problems. By understanding the
strengths and weaknesses of each method, the designer can construct a
logical and workable research plan for any given project, and can
combine the above research methods as called for by the nature of the
problem at hand.

fig. 7 A user research plan for task-oriented information design
examples of student projec ts using

this research approach
Following are examples of undergraduate student projects from the visual
communication design program at The Ohio State University, where the
basic research approach described here has been introduced and put into
use. Some of the projects are fairly simple and short-term, as would be
appropriate to basic graphic design courses, while others are more complex
and long-term, as would be appropriate to more advanced coursework.
Figure 8 is the outcome of a basic-level graphic design course
project, where students are asked to create visual representations of
opposing concepts and then conduct a simple audience-testing exercise
to measure the eKectiveness of their eKorts. Students rst construct
compositions by hand (with no words appearing to label the concepts),
and use these versions to test with audience members. They show each
composition to twenty randomly chosen viewers, who are asked to
complete a semantic diKerential survey form and rank a particular concept
with ve associated words and their antonyms. Students then create a
graph that displays the average viewer responses on the semantic
diKerential scale. Audience responses to compositions that properly
convey the intended properties will naturally fall to the appropriate side
of the scale. Students also consider any written responses from viewers
while rening their compositions, and then create nal versions on the
computer (where the original concept words are added). The basic
process of dening desirable attributes for their eKorts, creating and
testing a visual concept, and rening that concept based on viewer
response is introduced through this project, and gives beginning

fig. 8 Opposing concepts exercise and average viewer responses to associated properties
students a glimpse of the approach that will be used throughout their

subsequent courses.
Survey research is also applied in an intermediate-level course project,
the development of a visual mark as part of a corporate identication
system. At the top in gure 9 is a student-created mark for an organization
providing environmental clean-up services, along with application of the
mark to various items. At the bottom are average audience responses
to a list of desirable attributes, including the words organic, clean, wet,
nurturing, calm, healthy, fresh, and natural. Almost all of the attributes
were perceived as intended in this case, falling to the desired side of
the scale. Students gather viewer responses using a fairly tight black-
and-white sketch of the mark, so that any renements prior to
implementation can incorporate suggestions or comments that come
from audience member responses to the design concept.

fig. 9 Corporate identication materials and average viewer responses to desirable attributes
Behavioral research is also employed in the development of

interactive media, such as the examples from an advanced-level student
web-design project (fig. 10). In this case, the student observed users
navigating other e-commerce sites, noticing problems with how various
visual interfaces presented the idea of a virtual shopping cart. This led
the student to allow users to drag objects into a scrolling eld (at the
bottom of the screen designs) that presented smaller images of the items
to be purchased, thus giving users a visual reference of their shopping
choices. The student then tested this interface concept with users and
rened the interaction design based on further feedback and evaluation.
Similarly, advanced-level students engage in behavioral research in
the context of environmental graphics and waynding systems design.
The images to the left in gure 11 are some concepts for exterior signs to
identify the major entrances of visual and performing arts buildings on

fig. 10 Examples of webpage designs incorporating a visual shopping cart
the Ohio State campus. Students observed the ow of people entering

the various buildings throughout the day and developed customized
signs that took advantage of optimal placements, based on likely views
from approaching the buildings on foot (the typical manner in which
almost all users access the buildings).
The students also used digital video as a tool to track users
navigating the interiors of various campus arts buildings, looking for
situations where confusion arose in a consistent manner. These
observations gave them insight into critical locations for the placement
of interior waynding signs, where full-scale mock-ups could then be
placed and tested for their eKectiveness. The images to the right in
gure 11 are stills from one student groups nal video presentation, in
which they asked several arts students to nd the deans ogce and
documented the resulting problems with completing that particular task.
fig. 11 Environmental graphics and still images from video research

The nal examples are from a task-oriented information design
project, completed by an advanced-level student (fig. 12 ). In this case,
the student used mostly participatory user research methods to develop
a cookbook for individuals with mental retardation and developmental
disabilities. Working closely with users (and their caretakers) in a group
home, the student was able to evaluate various approaches to displaying
cooking information in the kitchen setting, eventually developing the
most eKective presentation.
An early concept was a poster display, using clearly numbered
rows of information presented in sequential steps. Testing uncovered,
however, that the users did not necessarily follow the horizontal rows,
and were more apt to move vertically down the page to obtain the
information. These ndings led to a much simpler approach in book
form, with no more than two steps presented on a single page, or a total
of four steps on a spread of two pages. This organization allowed the
users to follow the sequence successfully and kept them from being
overwhelmed by too much simultaneous information. Further user
evaluation of mock-ups resulted in a nal book format with large page
sizes (for viewing from a distance of a few feet), laminated pages (in case
of spills), and wire binding (so the book could lay at on the kitchen
counter). All of these design decisions were a direct result of the process
of partnering with the users in the development of the communication.
fig. 12 Cookbook cover and example pages

some final analysis and comments
The above student projects represent results of coursework completed
in no more than ten weeks, the length of an academic term at The Ohio
State University. Compared to the time and resources available to
professional designers and researchers involved with similar projects,
the research activities and student outcomes may be somewhat lacking
in depth, and most likely do not provide denitive solutions to the
particular design problems addressed. As well, due to a lack of available
documentation, the kinds of data typically reviewed by serious
researchers are not presented here. The students results do, however,
represent their initial experiences involving interactions with viewers,
and provide a stepping stone to continue such activities as design
professionals. In fact, many Ohio State alumni have taken on leadership
roles in the profession, expanding and building upon these research
techniques while successfully applying them to a variety of visual
communication problems.
In most cases students are accepting and enthusiastic in regard to
viewer-centered approaches to graphic design. While some resistance
is initially encountered, it usually disappears quickly once students
realize that interacting with viewers allows them to create potentially
more eKective results. Similarly, most users and audience members are
generally grateful for the opportunity to voice their opinion on
communications meant for their usethough there is always a small
minority that view any attempt to interact with them as an intrusion,
and prefer not to be bothered.
Working with viewers can also have potential liability issues for
students, institutions of higher learning, and design practitioners. It is a
very good idea to require that all users and audience members sign a
waiver form agreeing to participate in a study, and to give permission to
the researcher to use the results as necessary. Many universities require
review and pre-approval of any research that involves human subjects,
and that process, while time-consuming, must be followed. Professional
designers would do well to consult with a legal advisor concerning
similar steps they might take to protect themselves when working with
users and audience members.
To conclude, many graphic design education programs tend to
impart the values of the artist to students, stressing the concept of an

individual with a strong personal viewpoint to express through their
work. While this approach can make for some very interesting visual
results, it seems a bit narrow in its focus when one considers the very
real and important needs of the various users and audience members
who experience our work on a daily basis. By focusing so strongly on our
own interests and agenda, we run the risk of excluding or alienating
those for whom the communications we develop are intended. It can be
easily argued that one of our most important contributions to society is
the simple act of creating communications that are eKective for
audiences and users. But this goal cannot be achieved without rst
taking the step to identify and include those individuals for whom we
design, so that they may fully participate in the process of creating
useful communications.
This article was presented at FutureHistory: The AIGAs Design Education

conference in October 2004. It was subsequently published in the Design Research
Journal of the Australian Graphic Design Association.

references
The specic research methods discussed have been explored and written about by
many others, and the past works of fellow design educators have been extensively
drawn upon. As well, the work of researchers in engineering and the social sciences
has been referenced. Two much older (but still very applicable) texts have also been
drawn uponColin Cherrys description of the process of human communication, and
Charles E. Osgoods use of the semantic diKerential as a tool for measuring basic
viewer response to visual communications. The work of all of the authors listed below
is gratefully acknowledged as the foundation for this article.
This writing is also a continuation of the authors past work, including a recent call
for a more inclusive and user-centered approach to graphic design practice, and the
results of a large-scale survey of U.S. graphic design practitioners concerning their
involvement with design research activities. Finally, many thanks to the design students
at the Ohio State University for their hard work, and for the use of the project results
shown and discussed.
Allmendinger, Leif, ed. Workshop Notes: Research and Information Development.

Graphic Design Journal 4. Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, 1996: 2225.
Byrne, Kevin. Crossdisciplinary Teaching: Audience-Centered Design. Proceedings of
the 1990 Graphic Design Education Associations National Symposium (1990): 99106.
Cherry, Colin. On Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1957.
Clarkson, Jonathan, Roger Coleman, Simeon Keates, and Cherie Lebbon, eds. Inclusive
Design: Design for the Whole Population. London: Springer Verlag, 2003.
Frascara, Jorge. Communication Design: Principals, Methods, and Practice. New York:
Allworth Press, 2004.
. User-Centered Graphic Design: Mass Communications and Social Change. Boca
Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1997.
Nini, Paul. A Manifesto of Inclusivism. In Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Steven
Heller, eds., Looking Closer 4, Critical Writings on Graphic Design. New York:
Allworth Press and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, 2002, 19699.
. What Graphic Designers Say They Do. Information Design Journal 8, no. 2 (1996):
18188.
Osgood, Charles E. The Measurement of Meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1967.
Poggenpohl, Sharon. Why We Need Design Research. Graphic Design Journal 4. The
Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, 1996: 2021.
Roth, Susan King. The State of Design Research. Design Issues 15, no. 2 (1996): 1826.
Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N. From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches. In
Jorge Frascara, ed., Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections. London:
Taylor & Francis, 2002, 18.
Schuler, Douglas, and Aki Namioka, eds. Participatory Design: Principles and Practices.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.
Scrivener, Stephen, Linden J. Ball, and Andree Woodcock, eds. Collaborative Design:
Proceedings of CoDesigning 2000. London: Springer-Verlag, 2000.

chapter 9
Design Methodologies: Toward

a Systematic Approach to Design
MAT T COOKE
For many years my former employer, World Cancer Research Fund

(WCRF), in London, England, had conducted rigorous reviews of the
content of all of its public education materials, to ensure they were
scientically accurate. But the graphic design of these pieces was
ultimately dictated by the tastes and experiences of a few senior staK
members. As a designer and educator, I wanted to be sure that our
proposed visual approaches were as thoroughly conceived and reviewed
as the content itself, and I wanted to develop a system that would enable
us to test the eKectiveness of our publications, get feedback and
suggestions for their improvement, and eKectively repeat our actions to
develop further visual interventions.
In order to achieve these goals, I reasoned that rather than trying
to produce materials that met with the approval of an internal audience
(in this case, the WCRF Obesity Committee), we needed to develop a
user-centered design methodology that would enable us to produce a
range of materials designed specically for our intended target audience.
Despite my initial reservations about pursuing such a pragmatic
approach, I set out to prove that creativity neednt be compromised,
and that the design process could be enhanced while working within
a structured methodology.
130
While reviewing the appropriate literature, I began to realize that
working with design methodologies would mean a change of focus for our
team, from visionary creators to less romantic, but more pragmatic,
planners of systems. In this approach, the greater challenge would lie not
solely in developing the graphic presentation of a product but in devising
an eKective, accountable methodology for its production. Although this
may initially seem anathema to most designers, Jorge Frascara, professor
of visual communication design at the University of Alberta, Canada,
highlights the challenge and importance of such an approach: To design
the research method and to design the design method are tasks of a
higher order than to design the actual communications. Methods create
frames, paradigms within which design decisions take place.1
When confronted with a relatively rigid methodology, many designers
begin to feel uneasy. The thought of strictly following a process goes
against our perception of design as an instinctive, intuitive, and artistic
practice. But the truth is that, however informally, the majority of us
follow a methodology when designing. I wanted to formalize some of our
existing practices by building on existing design methodologies, testing
their eKects on the design process, and developing a structured approach
that could help us to deliver a more eKective piece of design. While
some methodologies are not appropriate for every designer or situation,
I set out to prove that, in the right circumstances, user-centered research
can make designing easier and more eKective.
case study
In the 1990s, it became increasingly apparent to WCRF that an unhealthy
body weight and obesity were becoming a major health concern in the
United Kingdom and the rest of the industrialized world.2 While the link
between body weight and hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes,
and osteoarthritis had been well documented, emerging science began
to conrm the news that body weight can aKect cancer risk too.3
Responding to this increasingly irrefutable evidence, WCRF made a
commitment to producing a public education program highlighting the
dangers of being overweight. Central to the campaign would be a health
promotion leaet that would be distributed to doctors waiting rooms
throughout the U.K. by an organization called Waiting Room Information
Services (WIS), as well as via a host of other available means. As WCRF
131
Head of Education, I was able to use this campaign as a case study to
test the validity of design methodologies, and hopefully to deliver more
eKective, accountable communication materials for the campaign.
I initially developed the design methodology by researching
theorists and practitioners in the eld, including Jorge Frascara, Gui
Bonsiepe, Lucien Roberts, Jan van Toorn, and Dietmar Winkler. From the
pool of existing work, I was able to devise a rst draft of my own
methodology, which was an evolution of the existing theoretical models
and was designed to be updated and modied with use (fig. 1). In order
to test its validity and add to its eKectiveness, I applied it to the project
for the WCRF leaet.
stage 1: definition
The rst stage of the design process, denition, is an outline of the
project in its initial form. At this stage the design team asked a series of
questions to establish the nature of the problem and assess whether
visual communications could make a signicant contribution toward
reducing that problem.
Dene the Design Problem

The rst objective of the design methodology was to identify and dene
the design problem at hand. WCRF became aware that obesity was
strongly linked to an increased risk of cancer. Since this was a relatively
new nding, WCRF wanted to raise awareness that this association
exists. Therefore, the design problem was: to raise awareness that there
is a link between an unhealthy body weight/obesity and cancer.
Is the Design Problem Signicant? Can Visual Communications

Contribute to Its Reduction?
Given that maintaining a healthy body weight can help to limit a
persons chances of developing cancer, it became instantly obvious that
the design problem is signicant. And since there is clear evidence that
visual communication campaigns, especially when combined with other
media-related techniques, can raise awareness of health-related issues,
the decision to proceed was an easy one.

fig. 1 Initial design methodology model
COOKE: DESIGN METHODOLOGIES 133

Dene the Causes of the Problem
The problem the design team faced was that people were not aware that
being overweight contributed to their risk of cancer. The cause of the
design problem was simply that the information was new and needed to
be disseminated in an eKective way.
Dene the Target Audience

To communicate eKectively, the design team needed to dene the
intended target audience. Campaigns that attempt to communicate with
the public at large are not as successful as those that deal with smaller,
more quantiable audiences.4 WCRF wanted to target women between
the ages of sixteen and thirty-four: the organization thought that this
age group would already be interested in their weight, have the potential
to inuence the food decisions of their family, and be less likely, due to
their age, to be irreversibly overweight or obese.
stage 2: divergence
The divergent search is where the majority of the background research
took place. The design team broadened the parameters of the design
problem, giving itself the best chance of nding a suitable solution. At
this stage the team dismantled their initial preconceptions about the way
the nal project might look and assessed the project from every angle.
John Chris Jones, inuential author of Design Methods, states that the
useful eKects of using such methods are, rstly, to oblige designers to look
outside their immediate thoughts for relevant information and, secondly,
to inhibit the tendencies to plump for the rst idea that comes up.5
The divergent search is also the point at which we attempted to get
to know the target audienceto understand their likes and dislikes, to nd
out what motivated and stimulated them. In other words, it is where we
tried to learn some of their values and attempt to learn their language
both verbal and visual. As part of the divergent search, we pursued three
main avenues of research: gathering quantitative data; gathering
qualitative data; and researching the visual tastes of the target audience.
Gather Quantitative Data

The quantitative data we collected for the WCRF project came from
health promotion leaets already available in doctors surgeries. These

leaets would be competing for our end-users attentions and would
also form the visual terrain in which our leaet would be operating. We
conducted a content analysis of the ten most popular leaets to
determine whether they shared any common visual elements. We
assessed typeface, type size, and type color; visual imagery; and paper
type, weight, and color. By identifying some common visual trends,
we were able to draw some broad conclusions that would provide the
rst pointers toward an appropriate visual language.
Gather Qualitative Data

In general terms, qualitative research aims to understand more about
the way things work in a real environment. Conducting qualitative
research for a graphic design project encourages the designer to focus
less on the formal preoccupations of design and more on peoples
behavior and attempts to understand their motivations.
Our task was to nd out what members of the target audience
thought about, and how they interacted with, a broad range of health
promotion leaets. In the rst qualitative test, we asked members of the
target audience to pick out the most appealing leaet from the entire
range of thirty-ve commonly found in doctors waiting rooms. Each of
the respondents was then asked to explain why they made their specic
choices. From these in-depth interviews, we were able to build a map of
likes and dislikes, potential dos and donts, of healthcare leaet design.
Visually Research Target

Next we explored the target audiences visual preferences. The idea was
to gain enough knowledge about the audience to enable the design team
to tap into their aesthetic values and also to understand some of the
cognitive processes behind their tastes. Speaking the language of the
audience is crucial in attempting to appeal to them and change their
understanding of any issue. Frascara notes that communication must
be detectable, discriminable, attractive, understandable, and convincing.
It has to be constructed on a knowledge of visual perception, human
cognition and behavior, and with consideration for the personal
preferences, cognitive abilities and value systems of the audience.6
As part of our visual research, we gathered a collection of printed
materials that were designed to appeal to the target audience. We then

asked members of the target audience to cut out images, type, colors
anything they found appealing. They then pasted their clippings onto
large sheets of paper to create mood boards, which we fastened to the
walls of our studio. The mood boards enabled us to devise color palate
and typeface tests later on in the design process. We also analyzed an
array of other sources, from websites to store fronts, in order to better
understand the visual landscape with which our target audience interacts.
Next, members of the design team (which importantly also included
members of the target audience) brainstormed ideas for appropriate
imagery. Based on the outcome of these research techniques, the design
team was able to produce a variety of dummy coversfeaturing
appropriate imagery, type treatments, and color palateswhich we showed
to the same members of the target audience and again interviewed them
about their preferences. Our ndings further rened the framework
within which the design team would later operate and gave us a greater
understanding of our end-users potential visual preferences.
Enhance Design Problem

Having completed the divergent search, the design team was able to
draw some general conclusions that served to enhance the original
design problem. We learned many valuable lessons about our potential
end-users needs and desires, and we were beginning to build a clearer
framework for the design team:
the overall design should be positive, upbeat, hopeful, and enticing;
light, sans-serif typography should be matched with bright colors
and neutral but attractive imagery;
the graphic presentation should be simple and easy to read;
imagery should be either photographic or illustrative, with an
emphasis on either literal weight issues, such as scales and tape
measures, or active outdoor scenes that entice and encourage;
images of unattainable bodies are to be avoided.
Agreed Design Objectives

To measure the performance and eKectiveness of our proposed visual
communication, we agreed upon a set of achievable and realistic design
objectives, against which any measurements could be taken. We
presented the following criteria for the leaet:

it needs to be easy to read and clearly convey the message that
weight is related to cancer;
it must appeal to the target audience and be commonly picked
up in doctors waiting rooms;
it should be uplifting and positive;
it needs to reect WCRFs core values: professionalism, authority,
expertise, trustworthiness, and accessibility.
At this stage we also had to work out ways in which these objectives
could be measured. To do this we planned to use the combined data from
a national survey testing public opinion about the link between weight
and cancer; a survey testing WCRF supporters knowledge about the link;
and WISs own reports determining whether the leaet was being picked
up in doctors waiting rooms.
Agreed Channels of Distribution

Apart from doctors surgeries, we approached three main alternative
channels of distribution: health promotion clinics, womens media, and
WCRF supporters. We also considered the importance of looking beyond
the leaet itself as a vehicle for communication and decided the best
way to deliver the message would be to hold a press conference, where
the relationship between weight and cancer risk would be told to the
media in a newsworthy manner.
Having agreed on the best ways to communicate with an intended
audience, the design team had to be sure that these were aKordable
and eKective. After some background research, we determined that
these channels of distribution would ensure that the campaign
eKectively reached a wide and varied audience, while falling within the
organizations budget.
stage 3: transformation
Having completed the divergent search, the design team then had the
raw material that would evolve into a set of proposed visual solutions.
This is the process of transformation and, as Jones says, this is the stage
of fun, high-level creativityeverything that makes designing a delight.7
Nevertheless, this is not an innocent practice. The design team is
trying to eKect a change in human understanding, and the knowledge
gained in the preceding stages gave us a greater chance of achieving this

goal. It was essential that lessons had been learned by the design team
and that we did not simply revert to personal styles or comfort ourselves
by aping current trends. Frascara warns: Frequently, designs fail
because of the exploration and use of visual languages foreign to the
audience. Others, imitating fashionable styles, tint messages with
ideologies that could be at odds with those pertaining to the intentions
of their content.8
It was crucial, at the transformation stage, for the design team to
examine its motives behind any proposed visual solutions. Choices made
because they appeared cool rather than appropriate, or trendy rather
than suitable, needed to be rooted out in favor of ideas that might
better serve the content and context of the communication. To some this
may sound unnecessarily didactic, but to the user-centered practitioner,
it becomes common sense.
Design Prototype Graphics

Designing prototype graphics involved producing a whole range of visual
solutionsfrom rough, conceptual forms to fully resolved layouts. The
ndings from the divergent search, therefore, are not meant to limit
the design teams imaginative output, but rather are intended to guide
its creativity. Any fears that a design methodology would be restrictive
evaporated at this stage, and we felt empowered by the greater
understanding we had developed of our target audience.
Designing the prototype graphics involved determining the structure,
type treatment, color palate, and cover design of the leaet. As the team
progressed with the overall design, it canvassed opinion from the target
audience. Various graphic devices were tried and either rejected or
appropriated into the designs. This mini closed feedback loop gave the
process structure and enabled the team to move forward quickly with
ideas that were well liked. Key lines, colored type, colored boxes, column
width, type size, and leading were all experimented with as the design
team tried to hit upon a formula for telling the leaets story.
With the overall design in place, the team changed its focus to the
leaets cover. The cover is all that is visible to the casual browser in the
doctors waiting room and must therefore be attractive and desirable to
the target audience. Again, various covers were presented for feedback
unfavorable ideas were rejected and favorable ideas appropriated into

the next phase of testing. The information gained from the divergent
search gave the design team the starting point for its design of the
cover: white backgrounds were used, with a positive photographic
approach and left aligned, simple typography.
At each of these prototype testing stages, the design team worked
closely with members of the target audienceasking opinions, testing
appropriateness, and getting feedback until a satisfactory solution
was achieved. It should be emphasized that the design team was able to
employ its better formal understanding of design and aesthetics to
inuence the nal designed product. However, as previously emphasized,
the preoccupation of the design team had shifted from wanting to
produce cutting-edge or cool design to producing something that
works for the content and the context of the communication.
Test on Target Audience: Are the Graphics Appropriate?

As previously highlighted, the process of designing prototype graphics
had already involved constant testing and feedback. The design team
used the testing phase to help rene its designs and move toward an
outcome that was more likely to fulll the design objectives. Once the
graphics were considered appropriate, the design team could then test
its designs in a small-scale, accountable environment.
Test in a Small-Scale Environment

Before embarking on a major print run or rolling out with a large campaign,
it is important to rst test the eKectiveness of the material which is to be
used in a cost-eKective environment. This potentially avoids costly
mistakes and increases the chances of the overall success of any given
communication program. Testing also aKords an organization the chance to
make (and therefore to learn from) mistakes, and gradually move toward
a successful outcome. Failures at this stage should be seen in a positive
lightreecting the benet of testing, while improving understanding of
what might work in the chosen environment in the longer term.
In the rst test we aimed to gauge WCRFs supporters knowledge
about the links between weight and cancer. We contacted 143 respondents
via a telephone questionnaire, and were able to build good relationships
with these people and generate strong interest in the subject matter.
This byproduct of the process may have found one of the most thorough

ways of conveying the message. Indeed, Frascara asserts that relationship-
building is central to communication strategy: This is why the ideal
form of human communication is dialogue, where the interaction allows
for exchange and adjustment, and for the building and extending of a
shared terrain.9 If dialogue is considered to be one of the most eKective
ways to communicate messages, organizations should consider ways to
achieve this from the start of a project. As designers, we should also
consider the signicance of dialogue and be conscious of its importance
in conveying meaning. At a basic level, this means enabling the end-user
to literally interact with our designs, and also facilitating a broader
process of dialogue through websites, email, or telephone conversations.
As part of the WCRF telephone questionnaire process, we asked
supporters if they would be interested in receiving the nished leaet
about weight and cancer, and in answering another questionnaire about
the eKectiveness of the leaet at a later date. This would enable us to
test some of our design objectives and assess the leaets performance
against these criteria. We were extremely pleased with the results, which
conrmed that the vast majority of respondents found the leaet easy to
read, uplifting and positive, and informative.
In the second test, we oKered WCRF supporters the chance to
order the leaet, as part of a free information service in an edition of the
organizations newsletter. Of the six publications oKered that quarter,
the healthy body weight leaet proved to be the most popular: 2,061
copies were requested, compared to 1,571 copies of the next most
popular publication.
Was the Test Successful?

Having tested the leaet in a small-scale environment, it was then
possible to assess whether it fullled the design objectives agreed upon
earlier on in the process. At this point the design team evaluated the
results of the tests against the design objectives set out previously. On a
small scale, the telephone questionnaire test found that the leaets
tone, content, and presentation were appropriate for WCRF supporters.
And since the leaet also proved to be the most popularly requested
item from the charitys newsletter mailing, the organization was able to
condently assume that it would perform well alongside a range of other
health promotion leaets.

stage 4: convergence
The nal stage in the design methodology was convergence: the
background research had been conducted, design objectives had been
agreed, channels of distribution assessed, and prototype designs had
been narrowed down and tested. At this point the design team was able
to proceed and roll out the product in the full-scale environment.
Roll Out Full-Scale

The excellent preliminary test results allowed the design team to
move quickly from the prototype stage to completion. Between January
and March 2004, sixty thousand copies of the leaet were distributed
to doctors waiting rooms throughout the U.K. The organization also
printed an additional twenty thousand leaets for distribution to its
supporters, health professionals, and the general public.
Measure EKectiveness
Once the project had rolled out full-scale, the design team could then
continue with the process of measuring its eKectiveness by assessing
the products performance against the design objectives set out at the
beginning of the project. This is an ongoing process which enables the team
to recommend further improvements to the leaet, and the process itself.
In perhaps the most important test of the leaets performance, we
used WISs Quarterly Pick Up Reports, which found that 87.5 percent of
the leaets distributed to doctors waiting rooms were picked up, against
an average of just 56 percent. This meant that at least 52,500 people took
the leaet away with them and hopefully read the important messages
contained within.
In the longer term, WCRF will also consider the eKect its campaign
has had on raising awareness of the link between body weight and
cancer risk among the general public. The organization is doing this by
commissioning an annual TNS-Sofres survey of 1,000 U.K. citizens. The
objective will be to nd out how many people associated an unhealthy
body weight and obesity with an increased risk of the cancer and to then
assess whether public opinion has changed over the course of the
campaign. The rst survey results found that, of the U.K. population as a
whole, 43 percent believed that being overweight or obese was linked to
a persons chances of developing cancer, whereas 92 percent knew that

smoking causes cancer and 82 percent understood that excessive
exposure to sunlight is also related to the disease. The organizations
goal, therefore, is to raise the percentage of people who are aware of the
association between weight and cancer risk from 43 percent up to levels
on par with that of smoking and excessive exposure to sunlight. While
this process will take several years, WCRF can measure its eKectiveness
in achieving this goal and either maintain its current tactics or modify
them in order to achieve better results.
As well as evaluating the success of the leaet in meeting WCRFs
objectives, this process serves a wider aim. By assessing the leaets
performance and, crucially, by nding out some of the eKects it has on
those people who read it, WCRF is able to deliver a more socially
responsible product. For a non-prot organization reliant on public
funding, this sort of accountability is essential in order for the organization
to gain the trust and respect of those it seeks to inuence, and those it
relies on for its future income.
Recommend Improvements
One of the strengths of a methodology that continually proposes tests
and that ensures that eKectiveness is measured is that it continually
feeds back suggestions for improvement. This process ensures that the
methodology itself and the product being oKered evolve throughout
their lifetimes, responding to the needs and desires of their audiences,
becoming more able to deliver the results that the commissioning
organizations need.
WCRFs leaet continues to perform a valued function for the
organization, with large numbers already distributed throughout the
U.K. But its true eKectiveness continues to be measured and will only
truly be known after several more years of use. Nevertheless, it has been
possible to recommend several improvements to the methodology.
When Trying to Gauge Public Opinion, Use Real-Life Environments

This project would have been enhanced if initial tests to assess audience
preference were carried out in doctors waiting rooms rather than in
an ogce environment. In his essay, The Uniqueness of Individual
Perception, designer Roger Whitehouse states, What we need to know
is what works out there in the real world: not an understanding of visual

activity obtained from a relaxed and seated subject in a comfortable
and well-lit room, but information.10
Create a Dialogue with the Intended Target Audience

Dialogue is considered one of the most eKective methods of
communication and of eKecting behavioral change. Any campaign
attempting to change behavior, therefore, should explore the possibility
of creating dialogue even if, due to its expense, this forms only a small
part of the overall campaign.
Include Members of the Client Organization in the Design Team

Even if members of the organization are not consulted at every stage
of the design process, they should still be included as often as possible.
Members of the client organization will know their target audience
better than the design team and may also have access to an array of
relevant informationfrom competitor publications to a breakdown
of relevant media contacts. If possible, the representatives should be
familiar with the target audience and, ideally, fall within the target
audience themselves. As leading theoretician Victor Papanek asserts,
Most importantly, the people for whom the design team works must be
represented on the design team itself. Without the help of end-users,
no socially acceptable design can be done.11
Following a Design Methodology Is not a Linear Process

Having presented the methodology as a owchart, with clear linear
progression, it is obviousafter following each stagethat they do not
necessarily follow in this consecutive order. In future projects, I will need
to investigate other ways of presenting the design methodology that
reect this non-linear, but structured, process (fig. 2 ).
conclusion
At the beginning of this project, I set out to prove that design
methodologies can help organizations attempting to tackle social
problems to deliver more accountable, eKective design solutions. I also
aimed to prove that following a structured approach would not stie
creativity or hinder the design process. With some exceptions, I believe
this project achieved these goals on several levels.

fig. 2 Revised design methodology model

Firstly, by following a detailed, clearly dened path, I was able to
account for every stage in the design process. WCRF, condent that
these steps were benecial, was therefore reassured that their time was
being spent eKectively. Additionally, the organization could rely on the
agreed timetable proposed during the project and plan its activities
accordingly. Each stage of the process also produced results that were
presented to the WCRF obesity committee, further reassuring them that
the process was valid and valuable.
Secondly, the project produced an eKective leaet that is desirable
to WCRF supporters, easy to understand, positive and authoritative,
and above all, frequently picked up in doctors waiting rooms. We know
from these broad conclusions that WCRF can continue to promote the
leaet through its chosen channels of distribution. While there is always
the chance that it will not deliver its message eKectively, this process
has minimized the risk. The ongoing process of measuring the leaets
eKectiveness (through the WIS Quarterly Pick Up Reports) and the
campaign as a whole (through the annual TNS-Sofres obesity survey),
enables WCRF to judge whether it is spending its money wisely on
continuing the campaign. Should the campaign prove to be a success,
the organization will have a positive story to tell, which it can use to win
new support and justify its activities to its board members, stakeholders,
and supporters alike.
Finally, and most reassuringly for a designer, I found that the
process enhanced creativity. Having conducted in-depth research, we
were free to interpret the ndings in imaginative ways. During this
process we lost none of the usual joys of designing and gained instead
greater insight into the nature of the design process, and the benets of
designing with end-users in mind. I believe that this process ensures
more socially responsible design; it enables designers to take one eye oK
producing potential portfolio pieces andperhaps for the rst time
to focus on the recipient of the design, and on the objectives and
context of the communication.

notes
1. Jorge Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design: Mass Communication and Social

Change (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997).
2. Susan Jebb, The Weight of the Nation: Obesity in the UK (London: Bread for Life
Campaign, 1998).
3. Franca Bianchini, Rudolf Kaaks, and Harri Vainio, Overweight, Obesity, and
Cancer Risk, Lancet Oncology 3, no. 9 (September 1, 2002).
4. Ibid., 8.
5. John Chris Jones, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1980).
6. Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design, 4.
7. Jones, Design Methods, 66.
8. Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design, 13.
9. Ibid., 17.
10. Roger Whitehouse, The Uniqueness of Individual Perception, in Robert Jacobson,
ed., Information Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
11. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd
ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).

chapter 10
The Utility of Design Vision and

the Crisis of the Articial
MARK ROXBURGH
Until recently, visual communication was the province of highly trained

specialists who saw little need for methodically and analytically explicit
approaches to design, relying instead on creative sensibilities formed
during their education and professional experience.1 The historical link
between design and art education has reinforced notions of design as an
artistic activity.2 This perpetuates the myth of creativity by placing
undue emphasis on the formal characteristics of design, intuition, and
self-expression, resulting in a preoccupation with design intent and
outcome, what is called the mimicry of attitude and action.3
With the availability of cheap personal computers and graphic
software, the production of professional-standard visual communication
by do-it-yourself enthusiasts is ubiquitous. Design intent and outcome is
no longer the sole domain of the visual communication expert. In the
past decade attempts have been made to address this problem through a
renewed interest in design research. In visual communication this has
resulted in the wholesale adoption of critical theory and semiotic analysis.
Such tools alone, though useful in dealing with issues of meaning or
critiquing ideologies, are poorly suited to the empirical dimensions of
design practice. The preoccupation with intent, meaning, and outcome
has been at the expense of exploring the world of design usethe realm
147
of everyday experience. This highlights the problem of importing modes
of inquiry from other disciplines without addressing the diKerences
between design practice and the disciplines from which it borrows. For
visual communication, as for design, the problem lies in the diKerence
between the apparently analytical frameworks from which it borrows
and the synthetic framework in which it operates. It is the diKerence
between observing, documenting, and understanding aspects of the world
(typical of social inquiry) and transforming this knowledge into a
meaningful visual communication experience, beyond a presentation of
well-crafted visual data with social commentary.
why look ?
The philosopher John Searle proposes that vision is a critical feature
of human intention, outlining a relationship between how we see the
world, how we perceive the world, and then how we act within and
upon the world.4 Such action, bound up as it is with intention, is the
foundation of design in the broadest sense. If we accept this proposition,
and that the enterprise for design now is to concentrate on the realm
of everyday experience (the world of design use) as the basis for making
design projections, then a considered program of inquiry needs to be
framed around the role of observation. This is critical, as the material
world we inhabit and fashion is ooded with information that exists
primarily in the realm of the visual. As much design practice has been
aimed at intent and outcome, the nature and diversity of our experience
of this visual deluge has been overlooked. It is my view that an
understanding of such everyday experience is potentially one of the
richest sources of information for design action. Photo-observation is
well suited to capturing and eliciting the traces of those experiences for
design use. However, it brings with it historical baggage that presents
certain problems for design. To overcome these problems, an act of
translation is necessary, one that challenges the assumptions contained
within that baggage.
the crisis of the real

Two key issues arising in relation to photo-observation and design are
premised upon a surprisingly old-fashioned view of photography and
perhaps a misunderstanding of aspects of design. These issues relate to

the perceived problem between the analytic inference of photographs,
due to their proximity to the real, and the synthetic nature of design.
Photography and anthropology came into being in the mid-1850s,
and photo-observation has been closely associated with ethnography
ever since.5 By the late 1800s, anthropology was heavily inuenced
by biology, then primarily a science of classication, and photography
was used to provide visual information to categorize human races,
based upon theories of social evolution.6 In the relationship between
photography, anthropology, and science, the discourse of scientic
certainty prevailed. Photographs were seen as unproblematic records
of an observed reality and, as they were recorded mechanically, more
reliable than hand-produced images. The desirable proximity of the
photo to the real was further underscored at the time by the
naturalistic tendencies of post-Renaissance and pre-twentieth-century
European art.7 This proximity, coupled with photographys evidentiary
capacity, made it an attractive tool for the analytical purposes of early
ethnography. The function of analysis has long been attached to the
photograph; and while its use in ne art practice exists more in the realm
of the synthetic, and there have been assaults on the veracity of
photographic truth, our sense of its verisimilitude to reality persists.
More recent ethnographic endeavors have accommodated this, shifting
away from the analytical projects of rstly content analysis, with its
atomizing quantitative approach, and secondly structuralist analysis,
with its preoccupation with meaning, to an interpretative application
through phenomenological inquiry, with an interest in lived experience.8
Phenomenological ethnography, which emerged in the 1960s,
acknowledges the partiality of the researcher and the constructedness
of the ethnographic account. Research is not about the production of an
authoritative and denitive account of the state of aKairs observed, it is a
dialogue about a set of experiences. The photograph is an interpretation
rather than a reection of reality. Despite this shift, the underlying
interest of much ethnography still lies in an analytic account, be it
monologue or dialogue, of the world-as-seen.9
A more radical approach to ethnography emerged in the 1980s,
inuenced heavily by postmodern philosophy. According to the
ethnographers George Marcus and Michael Fischer, it aimed not to
foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience . . . to
ROXBURGH: THE UTILIT Y OF DESIGN VISION 149

reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the
conduct of everyday life.10 This approach can be seen as a response to
several factors:
the political objectives of postmodernism in generalthe
restructuring of small-p politics;
the crisis of the realthe challenge to the notion of a knowable,
objective reality;
the crisis of representationthe challenge to photographys
ability to document an objective reality.
Despite the erosion of photographic truth this heralds, in the context of
using photo-observation for visual communication research it would seem
that photographys analytic inference still holds sway, and its synthetic
potential is questioned. This is especially so when compared to drawing, a
form of visual research that dominates visual communication practice
and is seen as a largely synthetic process. It is for this reason that there
persists a surprisingly old-fashioned view of photography; in comparison
to drawing, photography seems to be descriptive and objective rather than
interpretive and subjective. That aside, it is within the phenomenological
and postmodern shifts that lies the basis for the translation of photo-
observation from the predominantly analytical enterprise of ethnography
to the predominantly synthetic enterprise of design.
time + distance = space

Analysis and synthesis, as they relate to design, must now be examined
in order to deal with possible concerns about slippage between the
analytical aspects of photo-based research and the transformation, or
synthesis, of collected data into visual communications. The central role
that the myth of creativity has played in design places undue emphasis
on creative intuition. Design is then readily understood as a largely
synthetic activity with little or no analytical framework. Though persistent,
this view has been challenged, with eKorts made in designs history to
develop a greater appreciation of the complexity of the design process.
Now largely out of favor, the Design Methods movement was critical
in embarking upon this endeavor. It challenged the assumption that
design was wholly intuitive and proposed a procedurally based approach
that regarded analysissynthesis as the natural order of the day: the
analysis of the design problem preceded the synthesis of the design

solution. The two were separate but related acts in a design process that
was presumed devoid of prejudice, preference, and prior knowledge.11
In the philosopher Donald Schons seminal case study, a more
complex picture of the relationship between analysis and synthesis
emerges.12 The space that separates the reection through observation
and conversation (analysis) from sketching design possibilities
(synthesis) seems nonexistent, and he describes them as parallel ways
of designing.13 Though this case study is narrow and does not deal with
the inuence that site visits, material availability, and so on, has on the
design process, the inference is that the separation of the analytic
(reection) from the synthetic (designing) is itself an analytical
construct. Sugcient case studies exist that broaden the scope of Schons
work and demonstrate a similar relationship between the analytic and
the synthetic.14 This brings us back to the issue of slippage between the
perceived analytic inference of photos and synthetic process of design.
Drawing is not seen as an analytical means of representation (though it
may be analyzed) because of its proximity to the action of design and its
distance from the real, by virtue of being hand-generated. Photography
is seen as an analytical means of representation (though it is also a
medium of synthesis) because of its distance from the action of design
and its proximity to the real, by virtue of being mechanically generated.
Our generally accepted understandings of these mediums are not
accidental but historically constructed.
The problem with the use of photo-observation in visual
communication appears to rest not only in its history or its proximity to
the real, but also in the space that exists between the moment of
photographing an observed situation and designing based upon that
observation. That space (time plus distance) is a yawning chasm
compared to the space between sketching and designing, and reinforces
the photographs analytical inference. As Schon and others have implied,
though, the separation of analysis and synthesis is somewhat articial
anyway. Rather than seeing this space as a problem that inhibits
design, we should regard it as another limit, to join the others, that
constrains design choice. Furthermore, we should abandon the notion
of design as analysissynthesis and regard it as a congurational
conversation between a range of people, things, and information
where preconceptions, intuition, and criticality are all part of the mix.15

The notion of design as conversation is a well-grounded and promising
metaphor.16
the crisis of the artificial

Perhaps the issue of space in relation to photo-observation and design is
redundant anyway, and conversations about it have not caught up with
recent technological changes. With the widespread availability of cheap
digital cameras, the space between photo-imaging and designing has all
but disappeared. When the dominant technology for recording images
was analog (lm), the photograph became the object of critical analysis,
emphasizing the constructedness of the photograph as text, and signalling
the crisis of representation. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen call
this the study of the representation-as-reference (to the real).17 They
also argue that as the technology for producing images has shifted to
digital, and images may no longer have their basis in the real, critical
theory needs to deconstruct what they call representation-as-design
examining the ideologically constructed nature of the design process
itself. This focus of critical inquiry signals what I call the crisis of the
articial, as it challenges the view, still embedded in much design rhetoric,
of design as a largely natural and intuitive process.18 The increasing
interest in, and arguments about, design research and process indicates
that this shift has occurred. Concern about the analytic attributes of
photo-based research in design is symptomatic of this crisis.
For critical theorists, the pursuit of this line of inquiry is to expose
the ideological workings of the design process. For designers, though
this is signicant, the pursuit is to understand and reect upon the
process, in its diversity, to better manage it. With the vast ows of
information we deal with, understanding combinatorial possibilities is a
way of framing limits to better manage the production of the articial.
Given this, we are not dealing with the science of the articial, or indeed
the nature of the articial.19 Instead we are dealing with what I call the
ecology of the articial, the study of our relationships between our
design projections of the articial world and our experience of it.
the crisis of the banal

There is currently a strong interest in the everyday and the banal in art
and media, the plethora of reality television being symptomatic. Visual

communication is not immune, with numerous projects that are
primarily photo-observation executed to document and explore the
everyday.20 Whilst such work is often engaging, it exists at the level of
beautifully crafted visual ethnographic accounts. This is what I mean by a
propensity to classify as banal observation of the world-as-found; there
is little transformation of the material beyond the representation-as-
reference (to the real). Visual design becomes the means of packaging
the representation.
Visual packaging is a consequence of the problem of translation
across the space between ethnographically informed photo-observation
and visual communication design. For such translation to be successful,
to avoid getting lost in that space, aspects of both need to be reframed.
From my experience in using photo-observation for design in my teaching
and research, it is apparent that it is easy to become seduced by the
content domain in which any given project is engaged, at the expense
of the design domain.21 The design domain is concerned with how you
tell what you know. The content domain is the knowledge of a subject
area developed through inquiry. While developing such knowledge is not
itself a problem, and can usefully inform design decisions, the inherent
risk for designers is the temptation to become expert in the content
domain, neglecting their expertise in the design domain. If tempted,
each new project presents new content and the requirement to become
expert in it. This is unsustainable and results in the tendency to package
representation and struggle with transformation (design).
This reframing occurs through the questions one asks. From the
ethnographic:
What do I know and what is there to know about this
situation, and how will I describe that?
To design:
What do I know and what do I need to know about this
situation, and how will I transform that?
Which gives rise to a question of utility:
How am I going to use this knowledge for design?
the utilit y of vision

The signicance of this reframing can be demonstrated in the nal major
project of an undergraduate at the University of Technology Sydney,

Brooke Hendrik, in 2002, in which she proposed executing a photo-
documentary project on dance, presented in book form. This had the
hallmarks of an ill-conceived but well-crafted ethnographic account of
the Sydney dance scene. In pointing this out, Hendrik was asked to think
about how the documentary photographs she wanted to take might be
used to communicate something visually, beyond the capturing of the
banal. She then reframed her project by asking: What do I know from
what I can see, what do I need to see about dance, and how will I
transform what I have seen to illustrate what I think is important to tell
us about dance?
Reframing her project revealed that she was part of the Sydney
dance scene and had recently completed research on the graphic
notation systems used for choreographic scoring. This research
concluded that there was no standard notation system, and that those
available were abstract, highly specialized, and not widely used. Hendrik
explored her interest in photo-documentation in relation to this
knowledge and conceived an image+graphicbased notation system. She
used photographs to document the physical movement she wanted
performed, and graphic notation to indicate where this movement t
into the whole, plus where it was to occur in the performance space. This
act of transformation involved designing both the system of notation
and a dance to test if it worked.
Hendriks work demonstrated that the space between the analytic
inference of the photographs and the synthetic process of design was
easily bridged. Though there was time-plus-distance between
photographing, processing, and working the photos into her schema,
she manipulated them in a similar way as sketching was used in Schons
case study.22 Images were arranged, reected upon, rearranged, and
substituted until the desired result was achieved. If a sequence was not
to her satisfaction, she would take more photographs, using time-plus-
distance to her advantage. This was very much a reective conversation
with the situation.23
conclusion
The use of photo-observation as a research tool is common in
architectural design.24 Time plus distance are acknowledged limits
architects deal with. The space between the analytic inference of

photographs and the synthetic nature of design can be accommodated.
This space, however, seems problematic for visual communication. This
is so because of its historical dominance by an ideology of unbounded
individual creativity that resists transparent process.25 Against this is my
view that design is about dimensions (scope of projection/imagination)
and distance (position in relation to projection) between us and the
world we encounter as messages and spaces. This space neednt be a
problem provided one is aware of the act of translation required to
bridge it. Part of this translation requires shifting from the simplistic
binary view of design as analysis/synthesis, toward the idea of design as
a conversation. In the age of excess (information) that characterizes our
current condition, this shift conceives of the designer as an editor of
such conversations, charged with the task of generating new ideas
from excessive imitation (the banal). To succeed in this process,
strategies that show us how to see, through observation, and methods
that teach us to value what we have observed, are required in order to
design in the here-and-now.

acknowledgments
The key concepts in this paper would have been impossible for me to
develop but for my ongoing conversation and collaboration with Professor
Craig Bremner, School of Design and Architecture, University of Canberra.
I would also like to thank Ms. Jacqueline Gothe, Visual Communication
Program, University of Technology Sydney, whose initial challenge to my
use of photography prompted this answer to her many questions.
notes
1. Gunther R. Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 23.
2. Andrew Blauvelt and Meredith Davis, Building Bridges: A Research Agenda for
Education and Practice, in Michael Bierut, et al., Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings
on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 1997), 79; Victor Margolin,
introduction to Margolin, ed., Design Discourse (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1989), 5.
3. Mark Roxburgh and Craig Bremner, Re-doing Design: Comparing Anecdotes
About Design Research, International Journal of Art & Design Education 20, no. 1
(February 2001), 67.
4. John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
5. See Michael S. Ball and Gregory W. H. Smith, Analyzing Visual Data (Newbury Park,
London, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); Jon Prosser, ed., Image-Based
Research (London and Bristol, PA: Falmer Press, 1988).
6. Douglas Harper, An Argument for Visual Sociology, in Prosser, ed., Image-Based
Research, 25.
7. Marcus Banks, Visual Anthropology: Image, Object and Interpretation, in
Prosser, ed., Image-Based Research, 15.
8. Ball and Smith, Analyzing Visual Data, 5470.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 125.
11. Bill Hillier, Space Is the Machine: A Congurational Theory of Architecture
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1019.
12. Donald Schon, The Reective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New
York: Basic Books, 1983).
13. Ibid., 80.
14. See Dana CuK, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991);
David Fleming, Design Talk: Constructing the Object in Studio Conversations,
Design Issues 14, no. 2 (Summer 1998); Kathryn Henderson, The Visual Culture of
Engineers, in Swan Lee Star, ed., Cultures of Computing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995);

Mark Roxburgh, Negotiating Design: Conversational Strategies between Clients
and Designers, Form/Work 6 (October 2003); Henry SanoK, Visual Research
Methods in Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991).
15. Studies in the sociology of technology provide strong theoretical and empirical
evidence of these relationships. See Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping
Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992); and John Law, Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering,
Strategy, and Heterogeneity, Systems Practice 5, no. 4 (August 1992).
16. See Richard Buchanan, Rhetoric, Humanism and Design, in Buchanan and Victor
Margolin, eds., Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); CuK, Architecture; David Fleming, Professional-
Client Discourse in Design: Variation in Accounts of Social Roles and Material
Artefacts by Designers and Their Clients, Text 16, no. 2 (1996); John Forester,
Planning in the Face of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Tony
Golsby-Smith, Fourth Order Design: A Practical Perspective, Design Issues 12,
no. 1 (Spring 1996).
17. Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 234.
18. I have subsequently revised my denition of the crisis of the articial but have not
included it here in order to maintain the ow of this paper. My more expansive
denition of the crisis is the search to nd . . . simple and appropriate forms of
language through which we can depict complexity and speak to each other of our
observations and experiences of it in order that we can imagine and manage the
transformation of the articial in a complex world, to manage and transform the
ecology of the articial. Mark Roxburgh, Seeing and Seeing through the Crisis of
the Articial, in DESIGNsystemEVOLUTION (Bremen: European Academy of
Design, 2005).
19. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Articial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Bill
Hillier, The Nature of the Articial, Geoforum 16, no. 2 (1985).
20. See Designers Republic and Ole Bouman, 3d > 2d: Adventures in and out of
Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2001); G. F. Smith, Open Air: The Changing
Landscape of Twentieth-Century Signage (Hull: Triangle, 2000); and Tomato,
Graphic Remixed, IDEA 286 (May 2001).
21. See, for example, Craig Bremner, Real Estate Opinions or the Truth about Home,
in Michael Douglas, ed., Invention Intervention (Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2004);
Roxburgh and Bremner, Re-doing Design; Mark Roxburgh and Jaqueline Lorber-
Kasunic, Looking for Limits in a World of Excess (April 16, 2004),
http://www.agda.asn.au/education/designresearchjournal/index.html.
22. Schon, The Reective Practitioner, 76104.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. See SanoK, Visual Research Methods in Design; John Zeisel, Inquiry by Design: Tools
for Environment-Behaviour Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
25. Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 12.

chapter 11
Communication Research: Theory,

Empirical Studies, and Results
PETER STORKERSON
Communication itself is a critical but notoriously digcult aspect of

communication design to study. As receiversreaders, listeners,
watcherspeople are individual, active, and dynamic interpreters, so
received meanings cannot be taken for granted. A model based on
human processeshow rather than what people thinkprovides a new,
empirically veriable way to study reception vis--vis design variables.
Its research methods can be used in laboratory experiments or in real-
world applications, providing new approaches to evaluating and to
designing communications.
Typographers study legibility and readability. Information and
instruction designers focus on cognitive ergonomics, such as comparing
how diKerent ways of giving directions compare in helping people follow
them. Another equally important aspect is interpretation: what something
is understood to be. It is at the root of metaphor, orientation, and
navigation, and how these are represented or cued. Interpretation can be
very much at issue in computer interaction and multimedia. Designers
need to understand the rules or architecture of such constructions, when
and why they succeed or fail, and how to engineer and measure success.
Interpretation has been an elusive object of study for several
reasons. First is the term interpretation itself. Its diKerent senses
158
confuse interrelated but distinct phenomena: identication of what is
there, its meaning or implications, and ones evaluation of it. We see
these three senses in three questions: What did she say? What did it
mean (are its implications)? How do I feel about it? This terminological
confusion also infects our understandings of communications. Do they
coordinate behavior?, etc.1
Second, the receiver creates his or her interpretation. Communication
engages and aKects behavior through the mind, which mediates between
stimulus and response. The mind is a dynamic, self-transforming system;
we learn.2 EKecting the self-transformation of receivers is often the goal
of communication. Third, communicative content is often unstated.
Arriving home at midnight, a teenager exclaims I got a at tire!, answering
the unstated Why are you late? Fourth, the researcher cannot presume
to have an observers objectivity when it comes to interpretation. The
observers interpretation is no more authoritative than the senders or
the receivers. These issues also aKect research methods. For instance,
we cannot take a persons report of what something means literally,
because self-reports involve translations from experience to verbal
account, from the context of the event to the social context of reporting.
The individual and personal nature of interpretation has always
presented deep digculties in understanding communication, leading to
the popular idea that interpretation is idiosyncratic. It is indeed possible
for diKerent people to interpret events or objects diKerently,3 but by
itself this view fails to account for our ability to understand each other
something we often manage to do very well. Communication designers
seek to be understood consistently across varied populations, and they,
too, often succeed.
To further complicate matters, modern communications, from
multimedia to news reports, are often cross-modecombining sensory
forms such as image, motion, and sound with voiceovers or commentaries.
Modern media often recombine individual modes non-redundantlythat
is, with distinctly diKerent contents, requiring receivers to interpret
across them. Sensory and symbolic modes of information are processed
diKerently, complicating the question of how receivers associate them.
The phenomenon of cross-mode communication is not new. Posters and
print advertising have combined visuals and text for centuries. Video
and computer media have increased the ubiquity and complexity of
159
cross-mode communication, increasing the need for knowledge to
develop expertise in designing for it.
If we are to create knowledge for communication design, we need
theories and empirical research. The two work together. Theoretical
investigations examine the concepts governing the investigation and
either explicitly ground them or replace them with concepts that are
grounded, expressible operationally, and testable. Theories present
research outcomes as instances of phenomena dened by theory.
Empirical studies mediate between theories and experience, nding
facts and establishing or disestablishing theories. In research,
knowledge is the joining of facts and theories. The structured thinking
embodied in theory and empirical research is a powerful way to
systematically develop knowledge.
the cognitive process theory of communication

The theoretical research approach introduced here addresses
communication issues, rst by clarifying interpretation and distinguishing
between identication, comprehension, and evaluation. Identication is
the organization of a eld of perception into discrete, intelligible units:
I see a dog walking down the street. Identication refers to the object
as we believe it to exist independent of us. We see identications as
objectively right or wrong. If one of us sees a cat while the other sees a
dog, at least one of us is wrong.
Identication is interpretation in its primary sense. The semiotic
phenomenologist Richard Lanigan refers to it as the production and
sharing between speaker and audience of an object of thought or way
of apprehending something, which is at the heart of rhetoric.4
The cognitive process theory bases interpretation not on individual
beliefs but on cognitive processes we share. They are blocks on which
beliefs are builtnot what we think but how we decide what we think.
While we may not always understand each other in practice, the
cognitive processes we share give us the ability to understand and learn
from each other through communication.
Figure 1: Symbolic and Sensory Cognition

Cognitive studies provide models of cognitive processesinsights into
how they work and how they are aKected by aspects of presentation.

fig. 1 Symbolic and sensory cognition (after Martha Farah)
Figure 1 diKerentiates sensory processing from symbolic processing.

Sensory processing routinely occurs automatically, delivering the objects
we perceive. Sensory modes of presentation show experiences at the
literal, depictive level. Sensory cognition is also physical and narrative.
The cognitive scientist David Waltz describes this using the sentence
My Dachshund bit our mailman on the ear.5 A language-based approach
to interpreting this sentence would be quite digcult, but we can
immediately grasp it perceptually as an imaginary video. Ambiguities
appear spontaneously. Did the mailman fall? Was he crawling? Was the
dog a giant mutant? Verbalizations often actually work by triggering
perceptual cognition which constructs the interpetation.6
Symbolic modes do not depict. They describe and schematize by
presenting categories and attributesthe one as walking mailman and
another as biting Dachshund. Sensory and symbolic modes complement
each other by providing glimpses of experience and schemas to make
sense of them.
Figure 2: Analogy
Sensory knowledge is also embedded in symbolic expression as physical
analogies or metaphors that are endemic in language and often
consistent across many languages.7 Figure 2 diagrams interpretation of
cross-mode communications using analogy.8 In analogy, two entities are
S TO R K E R S O N : COM MU N I C AT I O N R E S E A R C H 161
fig. 2 Analogy (after Sylvie Molitor, et al.)
two domains, each containing an object. Analogies are links made

between domains through elements that appear in both. Links across
domains can make relationships between objects and create emergent
relations within either object through the internal links between
elements in the other. The analogies are publicized schemas, which can be
applied elsewhere. The analogy time is like sand in an hour glass
represents time as a physical commodity, such as in How much time does
it take?, or I need to buy some time. Such analogies are not merely
dead pointers to their referents. George LakoK and Mark Johnson have
demonstrated that such dead analogies still forcefully aKect thinking,
leading, for example, to notions that laziness can be appropriately dened
and treated as theft and prosecuted under statutes covering robbery.
Figure 3: Non-Redundant Cross-Mode Communication

In cross-mode communication, analogical thinking combines sensory
and symbolic modes into new composites. Figure 3 shows a half-standing
house with the caption Saturdays fatalities provoked a debate on the
airports safety. We link common elements of a damaged house and
fatalities to infer that a plane crashed into the house while approaching
or taking oK from the airport.
Interpretation can be operationally indicated by memory. We
remember the things that we make sense of and as we interpret them.
What and how we remember is what we have identied. Testing memory
can avoid the problems of interpreting self-reports.

Saturdays fatalities provoked a debate
on the airports safety.
fig. 3 Non-redundant cross-mode communication
Figure 4: Stages of Communication and Reception

Approaching communication through cognitive processes points toward
new ways of analyzing and constructing communications that contrast
sharply with popular message- or information-based approaches. Here,
the communication is conceived as provoking and directing the receiver
to form an interpretation, which can be a conclusion, discovery, insight,
or any other object of consciousness. The communication establishes a
shared common ground or context on the basis of which a challenge to
understanding is posed. Aspects of the communication guide the
receiver by selectively supporting a specic interpretation. This approach
promises to achieve more consistent communication across populations
and oKers a grounding that enables designers to make use of theory
and empirical research in communication design.
fig. 4 Stages of communication and reception
empirical research methods and findings
There are a number of intervening levels in this model between the
communication and its interpretation that need to be connected:
perception, symbol reading, the combining of perceptual and symbolic
modes, judgment or inference, and memory. Initial research was needed
to determine whether the model actually works.
Two experiments comprised the initial investigation. The primary
goal of experiment one was to test the hypotheses that cognition can be
shown as a species-wide faculty underlying and mediating interpretation,
and that interpretation and cognitive function can be measured.
Experiment two investigated the relevance of design factors in presentation
and the measurement of their eKects.
These experiments demonstrated a generally applicable research
protocol that can be used for a variety of studies. By producing
commensurable results across diKerent experiments, this protocol
makes it possible to build a consistent body of design knowledge. Both
experiments presented ndings that are valuable to design, establishing
the validity of the theoretical approach, demonstrating that basic
research can have direct application, and presenting methods that can
be used in a range of basic and applied design research. The research
ndings of these experiments point to variables that designers should
pay attention to regardless of their approaches to design.
Figure 5: Experiment Movie

Experiment One
Experiment one focused on communication as a sense-making process
triggered in response to cognitive challenges presented by
fig. 5 Experiment movie

communicationsa process that is consistent across individuals. It used
forty movies of ten to twelve seconds each with video and spoken text,
assembled from diKerent sources. Each movie presented a single event
and a single spoken utterance. This is a simplest case approach.
Interpretation of a still picture relies on inferring events beyond its
frozen instant, while a video can explicitly present events in time. Spoken
text does not interfere with watching video, and text spoken over the
length of the movie assures that video and spoken text are attended to
across the entire movie.
Figure 6: Three Movies with Direct, Indirect,

and No Analogical Relations
Figure 6 shows examples of the movies. For the experiments, video-text
relations were constructed in four categories: 1) explicitly stated analogies;
2) unstated direct analogies; 3) unstated indirect analogies; and 4) no
meaningful analogies. These relations were expected to yield movies
ranging from ones that make obvious sense to ones that make no sense.
fig. 6 Three movies with direct, indirect, and no analogical relations
fig. 7 Experiment 1 protocol and data collected
test set-up
Subjects were recruited in a variety of public venues including airports,
lunchrooms, and libraries. The sample of 108 subjects was skewed
toward undergraduate students (64 percent of subjects) and toward
males (70 percent of subjects), but there were enough women and older
non-students for valid between-group comparisons.
The entire experiment required about twenty minutes for each
subject to complete. It was a self-contained application using a laptop
computer with earphones. This eliminated examiner biases and allowed
experiments to be conducted in varied locations.
Figure 7: Experiment One Protocol and Data Collection

Figure 7 shows the experiment, starting with the sign-in and collection
of background information. Next was a tutorial, which introduced the
experiment as a test of the communications, not of you. It included
brief instructions but relied most on prerecorded scenarios of other
subjects, modeling them as average, relaxed, and using their own
judgment. A keystroke practice removed keying digculties as a spurious
response factor and measured subjects reaction times.
fig. 8 Movie presentation with questions and responses

Figure 8: Movie Presentation with Questions and Responses
Figure 8 shows the integration section of experiment one. In it, each
subject was shown each of the forty movies. After each movie, the subject
was asked to indicate whether videos and text did or did not make
sense together, recorded as Integration-Segregation; and the subjects
condence in that judgment, recorded as Condence. The temporal
interval between the end of the movie and the keyed response to the
integration question was recorded as Integration Latency. The interval
between posting the condence question and its response was recorded
as Condence Latency.
Figure 9: Review Movie Presentation with Questions and Responses

Figure 9 shows the review section of experiment one, in which ten of
the movies the subject integrated were re-shown. After each was shown,
the subject was asked to indicate whether the relationship between
video and text was direct or indirect, recorded as Linkage; and what the
movie was about, or how the video and text t together, recorded as
Interpretation. Interpretation was an open-ended verbal response,
recorded on audiotape. From the data, scores were constructed for each
movie. A movies Integration-Segregation Score was the average of all
subjects integration or segregation of that movie. Similarly, a movies
Condence Score was the average of all subjects condence in their
judgment. A movies Integration Latency Score was the average of all
latencies in responding to the integration-segregation question for the
movie, and the movies Condence Latency Score was the average of
latencies in responding to the condence question for that movie. In the
review section, a movies Linkage Score was the average of all subjects
tendency to report direct or indirect linkage.
fig. 9 Review movie presentation with questions and responses
results
Background Variables
Background variables consisted of age, sex, education, student status,
and English uency. Except for uency, background variables had little or
no relation to responses. Sex was not related to any response variables.
Age and student status were related to latencies, but those diKerences
mirrored reaction times, which vary with age. There were small
diKerences between groups in the overall tendency to report movies as
integrated or segregated, but these diKerences were not repeated in any
other measures, indicating that they related largely to attitudes about
reporting, rather than to actual processing.
Seven subjects indicated that they were not uent in English. This
number is too small for statistical analyses, but there were anecdotal
indications that uency is critical. Those who were less uent missed not
single words, but entire phrases or the overall sense of spoken texts.
Movie Indices
On the integration question, subjects marked either (1) if video and text
integrated to one movie, or (2) if video and text were segregated as two
separate items. Integration-Segregation Scores varied from 1.05 (movie
almost always integrated) to 1.92 (movie almost always segregated).
The range and distribution of Integration-Segregation Scores
demonstrated that it is possible to design movies with diKering levels of
intelligibility and for diKerent subjects to interpret movies diKerently.
The mean Integration-Segregation Score was 1.47, indicating that the
average movie was integrated about half of the time. The scores were
normally distributed, with a few movies at the extremes and the largest
number nearer the middle.
The four-part analogical categorization of relations between videos
and words was a very good predictor of Integration-Segregation Scores.
The average of Integration-Segregation Scores was 1.30 for category one
(explicit direct analogy), 1.50 for category two (implicit direct analogy),
1.67 for category three (indirect analogy), and 1.78 for category four
(no meaningful analogy). Some scores overlapped across categories,
indicating other factors at work. In particular, verbal interpretation
responses indicated that subjects integrated movies rst as narratives,

indicating other possible approaches to video-word relations. We will
return to this result.
The mean of all Integration Latencies was 1,980 msec., with 95
percent of responses above 500 msec and 95 percent below 4,500 msec.
The mean and distribution of latencies were reasonable.
Subjects could report their condence as low, medium, or high.
These were recorded as 1, 2, and 3, so Condence Scores could range
from 1 (low condence reported by all subjects) to 3 (high condence
reported by all subjects). The lowest recorded score was 1.92, just below
medium, and the highest recorded score was 2.88, just below the highest
possible score. The average of all movie Condence Scores was 2.4,
halfway between medium and high. This above medium-average is not
itself meaningful, as it likely reects reporting attitudes. The range and
variations in movie Condence Scores was meaningful, showing that
movies varied in their interpretability.
Condence Latencies were much shorter than Integration Latencies
and varied very little, indicating that once the integration question was
answered, the condence question required no further thought. It seems
likely that the feeling of condence was experienced in the process of
interpreting and lingered thereafter.
fig. 10 Movie scores for Integration-Segregation and Integration Latency
fig. 11 Integration and Condence
Figure 10: Movie Scores for Integration-Segregation

and Integration Latency
Integration Score, Condence Score, and Integration Latency Score
interacted strongly with each other. As Figure 10 shows, movies scoring
high in integration and high in segregation showed equally low Integration
Latencies; it did not take longer to decide that movies could not be
integrated than to decide that they could be. There was, however, a
strong U-shaped relationship between Integration-Segregation scores
and latencies. Movies of which subjects most often made the same
interpretations, either to integrate or segregate, were easiest to interpret.
Those in the middle, the ones on which subjects diKered, were the more
digcult ones for subjects to resolve.
Figure 11: Condence and Integration-Segregation

Figure 11 shows a U-shaped relation between Integration-Segregation
Scores and Condence Scores. Condence Scores were highest when
Integration Scores were low or high, and lowest when Integration Scores
were at midpoint.
Figure 12: Condence and Integration Latency

Not surprisingly, gure 12 shows that quicker answers were given where

fig. 12 Condence and Integration Latency
condence was high. The graph appears to show a slight U-shaped

component, but it was not statistically signicant. Both Condence and
Integration Latency reect increased digculty in interpreting movies
with scores near the midpoint of integration and segregation.
Background variables had no signicant eKect on the relationships
between Integration, Condence, and the latencies. The U-shaped
curves linking scores for Integration-Segregation, Integration Latency,
and Condence remained signicant at 99 percent or better for all
groups. This was despite the fact that splitting a population into
separate groups reduces the statistical signicance of relationships.
review
In the review section, each subject was shown ten movies chosen from
those the subject had integrated (see fig. 9). After each movie, the subject
was asked whether the video and spoken language were directly or
indirectly related. Link Scores were computed for each movie, ranging from
1 for always directly related to 2 for always indirectly related. The mean Link
Score was 1.59. Link Scores closely tracked Integration-Segregation scores,
leaving the strong suspicion that the two variables were actually measuring
the same thing. The directness of linkage may be a precondition of
integration or it may be reported as a result of integration.
Finally, subjects were asked what the movie was about, or what
enabled you to put [video and text] together. Responses were
interpreted according to protocol analysis9 as records of the level of
thinking that was available to subjects after looking at movies. Protocol
analysis proposes that while we cannot take self-reports literally, accounts
will not reect a higher level or diKerent type of comprehension than
subjects have, so we can use self-reports to assay the type of interpretation.
Subjects were expected to oKer interpretations that gave an overall
concept of the movie or the linking analogies. Instead, subjects responses
almost uniformly provided narrative accounts. For instance, one movie
showed a video of a young man being forced into the back of a police car,
while a woman spoke of his anger. A typical response would be that he
attacked her and she called the police.
findings
Taken together, the ndings regarding Integration Scores, Condence
Scores, and Integration Latencies strongly support the cognitive process
model and rebut popular notions that the subjectivity of interpretation
makes it idiosyncratic, or that visuals and texts can be promiscuously
combined. The ndings show that interpretation is a reasoning process. It
is focused on the external world and seeks to avoid idiosyncratic responses.
The most signicant movies for research were those in the middle
rangeones that some people reported made sense and others reported
did not. Such conicting responses could be explained as reecting
diKerent interpretations, but that explanation would not account for the
increased latencies in keying Integration-Segregation in middle-range
movies. Increased latencies indicated that subjects found these movies
more digcult to interpret. Corroborating this nding, those same movies
had the lowest Condence Scores. Subjects were required to either
segregate or integrate movies; I dont know was not a possible response.
When forced to make a decision, some subjects opted for integration
while others opted for segregation, but underneath that apparent
diKerence was a consensus that these movies were ambiguous.
The consistency of these ndings across age, education, and sex
diKerences reinforces the view that the cognitive processes underlying
interpretation are species-wide rather than socioculturally dened or
idiosyncratic, and that interpretation can be determined by the cognitive

aspects of the design. In the review section, responses to the question
what enabled you to put [video and text] together? provided further
support for this model, indicating that subjects initial processing was
narrative. Stories often enable us to keep events or situations in memory,
allowing us to make sense of them later.10
Experiment Two: EKects of Presentation

Experiment two investigated the eKects of presentation on Integration-
Segregation and memory. It was built on experiment one, using the same
movies and a similar protocol. The sample population was larger, with
152 subjects tested.
Figure 13: Experiment Two Time and Mode Delays

As gure 13 shows, in experiment two the video and sound were shifted
in time relative to each other into nine states. The synchronized State 0
presentation was identical to experiment one. In the eight variants,
either text or video was delayed by one second, with a one-second overlap
of text and video, with no overlap, and with a one-second gap between
them. Movies were in random order, and delay states were selected at
random, so that a movie might be viewed in any of its nine states.
fig. 13 Experiment 2 time and mode delays
fig. 14 Experiment 2 integration and review sections
Figure 14: Experiment Two Integration and Review Sections

In the integration section, after watching each movie, subjects were asked
whether video and text made sense together, then how condent they
were in their judgment, as in experiment one (see fig. 8 ). Subjects were
then asked to rate the digculty of understanding the movie on a ve-point
scale from easy to hard, and whether they liked or disliked the content of
the movie on a ve-point scale ranging from strong dislike to strong like.
Movies, delay states, subject responses, and latencies were recorded.
The digculty and aKect scales were intended as a preliminary
measure of the relationships between the perceptual disturbance,
perceived digculty, and aKecthow well people tolerate interference
and whether their reactions to that interference transfer to their
evaluations of content.
Figure 15: Memory Test Movies

In the review section of this experiment, subjects were shown each
movie again and tested on recall. As gure 15 shows, each review movie
fig. 15 Memory test movies

was shown with either its video or text juxtaposed with the other mode
from four movies including itself. Subjects were asked to correctly match
the video and text that were originally presented together. Random
guessing would give a 25 percent memory rate in this test.
results
As in experiment one, background variables were not signicant. The
replication of the ndings of experiment one and the larger sample size
reinforced the observed consistency. The total Integration-Segregation
rate for synchronized movies in experiment two was 1.51, statistically
identical to the 1.47 observed in experiment one. When the Integration
Scores of movies were compared between experiments, there was an
extremely strong straight-line relation with an R square of .86 (86 percent
of variance explained), indicating that the same movies performed
the same ways in both experiments. Experiment two also established a
U-shaped relationship between Condence and Integration, in which
Condence is highest in cases where videos and words most obviously
could or could not be integrated. Temporal delays did not alter that
relationship. The results in experiment two corresponded closely to
those in experiment one, with an extremely strong R square of .791.
Figure 16: EKect of Time and Mode Delay on Integration-Segregation

Delay was signicantly related to two dependent variables: Integration
and Integration Latency. Delays did not substantially aKect Condence,
Ease, or Content AKect. As gure 16 shows, Integration was most likely
fig. 16 EKect of time and mode delay on Integration-Segregation
in the synchronous 0 State, with a score of 1.48. Segregation rose sharply
with even a one-second delay in either video (1.57) or words (1.58).
Highest Segregation was for one-second overlaps.
Figure 16 also shows that delays of text and video were approximately
equally eKective in inhibiting integration. This indicates that
interpretation requires combining both modes, even when one arrives
six seconds or more before the other. The eKect of even a one-second
delay suggests attempts to mentally resynchronize movies by holding
one mode in perceptual memory during the delay. Perceptual memory is
limited to one to two seconds. The slight increase in integration when
there is a gap between modes is not statistically signicant but suggests
that interpretation may improve when modes are presented separately.
Figure 17: EKects of Integration and Delay

on Memory Assayed by Recall
Memory tests showed that the variable aKecting memory most was
Integration-Segregation. For integrated movies without delays, there was
a 90 percent recall, while for segregated movies without delays, memory
dropped to under 75 percent. Segregated movies were almost three
times as likely to be misidentied as integrated ones. This result is
consistent with the thesis that we remember things we make sense of.
In integrated movies, the eKects of delays on memory were within the
statistical margin of error. In segregated movies, one-second delays, one-
fig. 17 EKects of integration and delay on memory assayed by recall

second overlaps, and one-second gaps between modes increased recall
substantially, from 74 to 84 percent. This result is consistent with ndings
of research on intratask interference. By making a learning task more
digcult, learning is slower, but what is learned is better retained. Thus, the
introduction of cognitive interference can actually facilitate memory.11
findings
Experiment two yielded signicant ndings of interest to communication
designers. It demonstrated the validity of a cognitive model, and its ability
to bring clarity and systematic order to the analysis of interpretation. It
demonstrated the practicality of isolating and measuring presentational
variables, and that its measurements can be translated into design guidelines.
Speaking practically, experiment two shows that even minor temporal
misalignments across modes can substantially inhibit interpretation,
even when there is no one-to-one correspondence of their contents.
Interpretation relies on linking modes together, so neither text nor video
has greater importance for integration. The metrics of the temporal
inhibition of integration correspond to the limits of perceptual memory.
Finally, cognitive digculty in itself can increase memory independent
of integration. It can focus attention, and while an integration may not
be made, lower-level relationships can function mnemonically. Patterns
such as rhymes enable us to remember songs and poems even if we do
not understand them.12 Thus, interpretation need not always be too easy,
and repetitions and patterns designed into the communication can
eKectively promote memory.
The theory and testing presented here open a new, empirically
grounded approach to analyzing and to designing communications, based
on the cognitive processes of receivers. They demonstrate the eKects of
design choices in presentation on reception. Findings can be used
prescriptively, to construct guidelines for competent communication,
which can then be applied across ranges of applications.
Of course, guidelines are only one use for research. Creative
professionals often fear that research will limit their creativity, but
ignorance is not bliss. Research produces knowledge that both promotes
competence and opens creative possibilities through its structured
involvement. Findings are discoveries of unsuspected characteristics or
metrics, which can be used and manipulated to create innovation, with a
wisdom that comes from a grounded, organized understanding.
notes
1. Jean Piaget, The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of

Intellectual Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1521.
2. Norbert Elias, The Symbol Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1991), 3649.
3. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
4. Richard Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Pontys Thematics in
Communication and Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988).
5. David L. Waltz, Toward a Detailed Model of Processing for Language Describing
the Physical World, Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on
Articial Intelligence, IJCAI-81, University of British Columbia (August 1981): 2428.
6. John Sowa, Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984), 19.
7. George LakoK and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
8. Sylvie Molitor, SteKen-Peter Ballstaedt, and Heinz Mandl, Problems in Knowledge
Acquisition from Text and Pictures, in Mandl and Joel Levin, eds., Knowledge
Acquisition from Text and Pictures (New York: North-Holland, 1989), 22.
9. Karl Ericcson and Herbert Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
10. John Black and Gordon Bower, Episodes as Chunks in Memory, Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 18, no. 3 (June 1979): 30918.
11. William Battig, Intratask Interference as a Source of Facilitation in Transfer and
Retention, in Richard Thompson and John Voss, eds., Topics in Learning and
Performance (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 13446.
12. David Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads,
and Counting-out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

chapter 12
Audience as Co-designer:
Participatory Design of
HIV/AIDS Awareness and
Prevention Posters in Kenya
AUDREY BENNET T, RON EGLASH,
MUKKAI KRISHNAMOORTHY, AND MARIE RARIEYA
Give a man a sh, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to sh, and
he eats for a lifetime. african proverb
The problem of AIDS in Africa is well known; it is both a threat to

economic and political stability and, more importantly, a global
humanitarian crisis. Research shows that communication is key to AIDS
prevention in Africa. In the United States, HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns
have beneted from the participation of experts in communication
design (graphic designers, advertising agencies, etc.). Africa, however, is
largely lacking in such expertise, and most designers in the U.S. lack the
cultural understanding of African societies that would allow them to
take on such a task. Preventing further HIV infections in Africa is a
communication problem that necessitates the application of an empirical
approach to designing preventive and awareness campaigns in order to
yield the most eKective graphics. In fact, previous studies of HIV/AIDS
prevention campaigns in Africa have shown that successful posters and
pamphlets are those in which their designs were inuenced by members
of their local target audience.1 Thus there is an important need to bring
Kenyan laypeople into the design process.
179
What kind of cultural aesthetics would Kenyans derive if they
designed their own posters? This is the question wethree U.S.
educators and one graduate studentset out to answer in the summer
of 2003, when we conducted a participatory graphic design workshop in
Kenya within a community computing center. In a participatory manner,
a small group of Kenyans designed HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness
posters for their fellow Kenyans using visual language from their own
indigenous iconography, under the supervision of the graduate student,
Marie Rarieya. Simultaneously, by way of a virtual design studio
constructed out of existing communication technologies, the U.S.
educatorssituated in front of computer screens in a classroom at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteindirectly observed and had limited
participation in the Kenyans design process.
research statement
Inherent in the discipline of graphic design is a historically untapped
potential to empower the audience to actively bring about change
through their own eKort and with their own ideas or concepts. In this
unorthodox context, the audience rather than the graphic designer
dictates which ideas reach fruition and potentially in which form(s) they
do so. In recent history, the design discipline in general has realized this
potential with the emergence of participatory designing, user-centered
graphic designing, and other types of experimental CoDesigning
processes.2 Of particular interest are those which involve a multidisciplinary
and multicultural creative team that includes members from the target
audience. The inclusion of multicultural audience input in the decision-
making phase of the design process brings about a signicant demand
for documented research models proven through practical application.
In the past, that demand has been met with theoretical models and
interdisciplinary user-centered research methods that include
questionnaires, surveys, usability tests, and focus groups. Though most
of these methods often yield indispensable information, they tend to
keep the designer (instead of the audience) in control of the concept and
the nal form. We propose the development of a participatory graphic
design process where the audience is the primary designer, with the
interdisciplinary professional design team working in collaboration as
facilitators. In this manner, the professional graphic designer serves as a

consultant while the audience controls the design process. We posit that
a participatory approachas opposed to the traditional intuitive approach
of graphic designerswill eKect culturally appropriate aesthetics for
cross-cultural communication.
All participatory approaches can be said to lie somewhere on the
spectrum between full designer control and full audience control. Rather
than occupy a single static position on this spectrum, our participatory
approach attempts to move the process toward greater audience control
over a period of time. The potential benets from such a method are:
A better match to the audience preferences and point of view.
Since culture is an evolving phenomenon, the aesthetics used to
represent it also need to evolve. While publication designer and
journalist Ronnie Lipton, in her book Designing across Cultures,
oKers practitioners heuristics for developing culture-specic and
multicultural aesthetics, the heuristics may eventually contradict
the notion of innovation in creative design.3 Continued use of
its guidelines over the long term will likely bring about hackneyed
(if not stereotyped) cultural aesthetics.
Future gains in terms of the independence of the community: the
possibility that they can eventually become independent designers.
An enhanced sense of the democratic process, a general
understanding that design decisions need not lie solely in the
hands of an authoritative elite.4
Recent developments in collaborative design processes suggest that we
can best utilize indigenous knowledge when we bring the audience into
the design process. In our experiment, we sought to collaborate with
Kenyans vis--vis and remotely via a virtual design studio. Rather than
assume that we had the knowledge and technology that they must
adopt, our design process began with the assumption that both sides
have valuable knowledge and technology to contribute. For example,
indigenous forms of communication such as oral tradition, dance, folk
theater, and sculpture can be combined with technology and Western
communication strategies and techniques in ways that produce hybrids
utilizing the best characteristics of both.
The success of similar hybrid approaches to development has been
demonstrated in other elds, such as agriculture. In the 1960s, green
revolution proponents assumed that specialized monocropping with
B E N N E T T, E G L A S H , K R I S H N A M O O R T H Y, A N D R A R I E Y A : A U D I E N C E A S C O - D E S I G N E R 181
chemical fertilizers would dramatically improve rural African lives.
Instead, these schemes often lead to soil depletion, over-dependence on
insecticides, loss of genetic variation, and other social and ecological
crises. The problems were exacerbated by ignoring the gendered division
of labor in African societies. Starting with the 1970 publication of the
article Womens Role in Economic Development by the economist
Esther Boserup, development organizations began to pay attention to
the critical role of women in traditional African agriculture, and to the
extensive indigenous knowledge in general.5 Rather than a romantic
return to the past, todays researchers in third-world development have
found that hybrid agricultural development, combining indigenous
knowledge with new technologies, oKers a better alternative.6 Inspired
by that success, our hybrid approach to cross-cultural participatory
designing is based on a similar framework, although the diKerences
between our design project and agriculture create diKerent research
requirements. In the case of agriculture, U.S. researchers found that they
needed to establish research centers in the third world; they could not
simply export U.S.-produced seeds into a new context. We similarly used
a eld research site for vis--vis interactions, but our eKorts were
supplemented by the use of communication technologies that oKer
virtual presence in the cross-cultural collaboration.
problem statement
According to communication theorist David Berlos model of
communication, clear transmittance of information occurs when the
encoder shares the same culture as the decoder (fig. 1 ).7 Recent
research conrms this nding. For instance, consider graphic design
historian Philip Meggss conversation with design planner Sylvia Harris
about American students who attempted to communicate to Nepalese
people the harm of ies contaminating their food with bacteria. The
American students presented a poster of a thirty-six-inch-long y that was
ineKective at bringing about behavior change because the Nepalese
people understood the ies in their village to be much smaller than
the ones the American students had created. The American students
failed in the cross-cultural communication eKort because they
assumed they shared the same culture-based visual literacy with the
Nepalese audience.8

fig. 1 Berlos model for communication
Berlos model implies that if the encoders cultural characteristics

do not match those of the decoder, then clear communication cannot
occur. Meggs reaches a similar conclusion in arguing that the Nepalese
people lacked the visual literacy necessary to decode the American
students graphic. However, both Berlo and Meggs assume that it is the
U.S. designers who possess all the important knowledge, and that the
global audience is merely a passive recipient. From a participatory
design point of view, the Nepalese people already possessed visual
literacy in terms of their indigenous iconography; it was the American
student designers who were lacking. In the HIV/AIDS campaign
collaboratively designed with Kenyans, we hypothesized that the visual
language generated in the design process to translate the message(s) of
the campaign would incorporate appropriate cultural signs and symbols
and thus resonate with a Kenyan audience because it would be derived
by Kenyans themselvesin a participatory manner.
field study
With funding from a research seed grant, in the summer of 2003 we set out
to start the participatory process by way of a virtual design studio linked
to an on-site design workshop in Kenya. An important question we sought
to answer was: What kind of cultural aesthetics will our participatory
graphic design process yield? In a participatory manner, using an empirical
Phase 1: Dene the problem
Step 1: Identify problem Step 2: Generate idea
State problem Derive visual words
Analyze target audience Derive metaphors
Conduct experiment 1: Conduct experiment 2:
Derive hypothesis Derive hypothesis
Choose a method Choose a method
Document results Document results
Reach a conclusion Reach a conclusion
Phase 2: Develop a prototype

Step 3: Write copy Step 4: Create graphics Step 5: Layout
thumbnails
Create copy Create graphics Thumbnail sketch
Conduct experiment 3: Conduct experiment 4: Conduct experiment 5:
Derive hypothesis Derive hypothesis Derive hypothesis
Choose a method Choose a method Choose a method
Document results Document results Document results
Document results Reach a conclusion Reach a conclusion
Phase 3: Design deliverable(s)

Step 6: Print nal
Produce nal object(s)
Conduct experiment 6 :
Derive hypothesis
Choose a method
Document results
Reach a conclusion
table 1: Steps 16 of Bennetts empirical approach to graphic design
approach developed by Audrey Bennett (see table 1 ), Kenyans designed

posters with their peers in Kenya, in consultation with U.S. educators and
a science and technology studies graduate student. At the same time, the
educators remained in the United States and participated in the design
process by way of various interactive communication technologies
Elluminate, LearnLinc, and Yahoo Groupstesting each one for its
eKectiveness for cross-cultural collaboration with third-world laypeople.

an empirical approach to graphic design
For several years, Bennett has taught a graphic design research course
on the theme of AIDS prevention. From conception to production, her
students conduct an empirical inquiry into the design of awareness and
prevention posters with their target audience. Table 1 outlines the
research process they undertook.
There are three phases in this empirical approach. The rst consists
of two experiments. Experiment 1 entails dening the problem; conducting
research on the demographic, socio-cultural, and technographic9
characteristics of the target audience; deriving a hypothesis; employing
an appropriate user-research method for conducting an audience-
response testing of the hypothesis; documenting, analyzing, and
evaluating the results; and revising. Experiment 2 entails generating a
set of ve unrelated concepts by brainstorming visual words and
metaphors and then repeating the same iterative cycle from experiment
1 of hypothesis derivation, audience-response testing, documentation,
analysis, and evaluation of empirical data, and revision. In this second
experiment and subsequent experiments, the revision stage includes the
elimination of the weakest concept.
The second phase includes experiments 3 through 5, consisting of
writing the text, creating supporting graphics, and sketching thumbnails
for each concept. Each experiment is followed by the same iterative
cycle as in the rst experiments, concluding with revision that includes
the elimination of the three weakest concepts.
Upon completion of experiment 5 and after a rigorous process of
elimination, the designer moves on to the last phase with only one
concept for nal production. This nal phase consists of a single, sixth
experiment, in which the nal communication design objecta
manifestation of the strongest conceptis produced and documented,
followed by the same iterative cycle. At the end of the process, the
designer reects on the strengths and weaknesses of the nal design
object and the design process for application to future projects.
The empirical approach is contained within an interactive printed
form that guides the student designer through the process. It has
evolved from a process sketchbook (the form used in the Kenyan
workshop) that students develop to a pre-designed forma design lab
book, imitating lab books kept by scientists.10 Like scientists, students
use their lab books to record and store the data they gather from each
experiment, including the audiences opinions and responses. Thus, it
serves to document the design process from beginning to end.
Reection on and analysis of this data inuence their creative decisions
throughout the process, such as their choice of culturally appropriate
aesthetics and the elimination of their weakest concept. This approach
was conceived with the intent to elicit eKective cross-cultural
communication by facilitating collaboration between the designer and
the audience on the appropriation of graphics conventions or the
invention of experimental ones that contribute more eKective visual
solutions to given sociocultural communication problems, such as
HIV/AIDS. Within a participatory design process, it can also be used by
individual members of the target audiencein consultation with other
members of the audience and interdisciplinary expertsto generate
graphic design objects.
the research projec t

Securing funds enabled us to pay a small group of Kenyans to participate
in this design pilot study. Marie Rarieya taught the above outlined
empirical approach to the Kenyans, who had no prior formal graphic
design training. She consulted with the Kenyan participants as they
conceived of their own concepts and sought input from their Kenyan
peers regarding the creative development of their concepts. The Kenyans
designed their own AIDS prevention communication propaganda using
their own visual language, while the design educators observed and
consulted virtually from the U.S. The following are samples of the
thumbnails and nal posters conceived and sketched by Kenyans during
the participatory design process:
participant biographies
The following are true stories about two of the participants, retold by
Rarieya from transcribed conversations between herself and each
participant during Phase 1, Step 1, to analyze the audience. The names of
the participants have been changed to protect their identity.

Jane Doe
Jane Doe is a mother of three, but she is also looking after eight children
who were orphaned following her brothers death. She is not staying
with them anymore because she cannot aKord to look after the children.
Now they are with their grandmother. The children do not go to school
because they cannot aKord fees, so they work as housemaids and
manual workers in the village. Jane informed us that one of the children
died recently in a road accident. Jane gave birth to two children when
she already had the HIV virus. One child, ve years old, is living with the
virus, and the youngest is negative because she took nevirapine while
she was pregnant. She also did not breast-feed this child but fed him on
formula milk. Jane knew of her status in 1994. Her husband went for
studies in India and came back with the virus. He knew but did not tell
her. She had heard of Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) centers,
and when she informed him that she wanted to go to be tested, he
refused. She did not yet know of her status; she just wanted to be tested.
In 1996 she got pregnant but miscarried. Her husband had gone abroad,
and when he came back he was badly oK, healthwise. By then she
already knew she was HIV positive, and when she informed the hospital
where she worked as a nurse, they refused to allow her to work anymore.
They discriminated against her. She was sacked and not paid her dues. By
then she was pregnant again. Her husband abandoned her. She was very
bitter. She started hawking to make a living, but her friends decided to
go around telling people not to buy from her because she had the HIV
virus. Her daughter was then in primary school, class eight. She passed
her exams very well but could not join secondary school because of a
lack of school fees. Jane gave birth to her third child, and the baby turned
positive because she breast-fed. Her husband decided to come back, and
at this time her mother-in-law died. Jane was made to go through the
customary rituals where she was to sleep with her husband before her
mother-in-law was to be buried. She got pregnant again. By this time she
was very frustrated and she even planned to commit suicide, but her
friends discouraged her from doing it. They encouraged her and provided
for her basic needs. Later she went to Kenyatta National Hospital to
deliver, and she informed the nurses that she was HIV positive. They
treated her well. She delivered through the normal procedure but later
had to be operated on to remove the placenta. She got a lot of support
from the nurses; they even shopped for the baby. She learned about an
NGO called Population Service International (PSI), which deals with
health issues. She joined when she heard they were looking for persons
living with HIV willing to go public so that they could be trained how to
create awareness amongst peers. Before going public, she took her
daughter for counseling and then told her of her status and that she
wanted to go public. Her daughter wanted to know when she would
dietomorrow? After discussing this, the daughter was okay, and now
even talks to her friends about it and the way her mother does public
speaking on HIV/AIDS issues. Jane told us her experience with a chief in
the village who wanted to marry her to be his third wife. The rst two
wives had died, and he was sure Jane would be able to look after him. He
did not believe that she had the virus, just because she looked healthy.
Janet Doe
Janet Doe is a widow and a mother of two children, and is also looking
after the four children of her late brother, who died of AIDS. She is a
born-again Christian. She was married in 1984, got pregnant, and gave
birth to a baby boy. From birth, this boy was always sickly. They tested
for various diseases but not for HIV. The boy died at the age of nine, and
Janets husband died one year later. Janet was to be inherited, but she
refused and therefore had to leave her home. She started getting sick
but did not know what was happening. Her friends, church members,
started avoiding her, saying she had HIV/AIDS. Her children also suKered
a lot from discrimination by their peers. Since Janet could not pay for
their school fees, they were repeatedly sent home, and other children
would jeer at them that their mother had AIDS. When the teacher asked
Janets children why they had not paid their fees, the other children in
the classroom would reply in chorus that it is because their mother has
AIDS. This was in 2000. By then she was very sick but still in denial. She
tried to commit suicide with her children but it did not work. They were
taken to a hospital, where she was tested for HIV but not told; instead,
her sisters were told. Her children were discharged from the hospital,
but she remained because by now she was very sick. She had lost a lot of
weight. Her sisters were told that Janet should be counseled, but they
refused. She was discriminated against even in the hospital. She was not
normal anymore: she had become hyperactive, behaving like a mad

person. A pastor came to encourage her. He told her she did not have to
die; she could live on if she believed. In 2001, she received news that her
sister, who had been very sick, had died in Nairobi. So Janet had to travel
to attend the funeral. Her relatives were shocked to see the state she
was in. They thought she would die at any time. At this time she had
terrible Kaposis sarcoma. She learned of MSF Belgium, where she went
to seek treatment. The Kaposis was managed, but she continued going
for treatment because she wanted to have surplus medicine. After a
while she was asked to be tested for HIV if she was to continue getting
treatment, but she refused. Eventually, however, she agreed, because she
needed the medicine. She was counseled and then tested. Upon learning
that she was positive, she was shocked. She said, I wanted the earth to
swallow me. She went back to Mombasa and shared the news with her
children. She informed them that she was positive, their father had died
of AIDS, and their young brother as well. Her neighbors segregated her,
they stigmatized her children, and life was just unbearable, so she moved
to Nairobi, where she learned of the NGO Population Service International.
She went and talked to her children about her wanting to go public to help
create awareness, and they were okay with this idea. So she went public.
Since then she has been trained on creating public awareness about the
disease. Both Jane and Janet Doe now go around in companies and
villages promoting permanent behavior change. They also try to reduce
the stigma attached to the disease through giving their own testimonies.
Janet narrated the story of how even after giving testimonies about
their status, men still want to date both of themsome even ask for
marriage. People seem not to believe that they have the virus, just
because they look healthy. What does Janet say to people out there?
AIDS does not choose, it kills. We learned from Janet that she had to
change her name because her family members refused to allow her to
use the family name if she was going public about her HIV status. They
threatened they would reject her. Both Jane and Janet Doe shared with
us their extensive knowledge on good nutrition to boost their immunity
and help increase their appetites. One problem they have is sometimes
they dont have money to buy food, which they really need.
Knowing the background and experiences of the participants that led to

their contracting HIV helped us to understand their choice of graphics
for their HIV awareness and prevention posters. However, since the
audiencefellow Kenyanswould not be told these biographies, Jane
and Janet Doe had to conduct audience-response testing sessions in
order to determine whether or not the visual language of the posters
were communicating clearly and eKectively. During audience response-
testing sessions, other Kenyans responded with the following comments:
Act now, abstain, stay alive does not oKer other options of staying alive, i.e.
keep to one partner. It is not easy to abstain. The text only talks to youth and
singles who can abstain. Red ribbon portrays a nationwide problem. Red
ribbon portrays unity in ght on HIV/AIDS in Kenya (figs. 216 ).
significance
Having the posters or pamphlets designed and produced in Kenya by
Kenyans had two signicant consequences: it fostered more eKective
communication with the intended audience, and more accurately
reected the audiences self-identity. As the Kenyans designed
prevention campaigns for their own peers, they were far more eKective
in knowing the cultural codes, symbolism, narrative strategies, and other
eKective means of visual rhetoric. Consider the use of African proverbs
written in the native tongue with occasional translations and other
phrases written in English, or that the people used in the posters were
from Kenya, rather than models from stock photography.
The AIDS epidemic is often accompanied by new labor congurations,
and adopting this modern identity can lead to higher risk behaviors. As
one Kenyan entrepreneur said, A bull dies with grass in its mouththe
Kenyan equivalent of an American saying, Live fast and die young. But
researchers in AIDS prevention in the U.S. note that youth subculture
identity is always a self-construction, and have found that strategies
which empower youth to link the aspects of self-identity they value with
AIDS prevention are some of the most successful.11

fig. 2 Nairobi Participant 1 (PAXA B): phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketch of concept 1
on AIDS orphan situation. The image represents a Kenyan child.
fig. 3 Nairobi Participant 1 (PAXA B): phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches of concept 1
on AIDS orphan situation. The image represents a married Kenyan couple.
fig. 4 Nairobi Participant 1 (PAXA B): phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketch of concept 1
on AIDS orphan situation.
Left: fig. 5 Nairobi Participant 1 (PAXA B): phase 3, step 6; nal prototype of design
object. The image is of a Kenyan boy (source unknown). The participant alternates
between white-, red-, and blue-colored type. The header is a larger point size than the
rest of the text. The text in the vertical column is all the same point size. Color, point size,
and use of uppercase letters create hierarchy in the composition. Audience response
testing of this prototype revealed the following responses from PAXA Bs peers: picture
is too happy. The image does not depict the hopelessness of the current situation caused by
HIV/AIDS. The font style should be consistent and aligned, notice the capital M in
motherless and the rest are small caps. There is also a typo error in foodlessh which needs
to be corrected. Keep the message but change the picture. This image of a Kenyan child was
a concern for many Kenyans. Consequently, the participant and Rarieya went out on July
28 to visit some households in Kusa who were aKected by the AIDS scourge. Rarieya
assisted by taking some photos to replace the one of this postcard. Other critiques from
ICRAF campus said that the picture and the message do not reect the same message.
Right: fig. 6 Nairobi Participant 1 (PAXA B): phase 3, step 6; nal prototype of design
object revised based upon audience input. The image is of a Kenyan boy taken by Rarieya
and the participant. The participant alternates between yellow-, red-, and blue-colored
type. The background of the text in the vertical column has changed in color from
medium blue to yellow.

figs. 7 and 8 Nairobi Participant 2 (PAXA B): phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches
of concept 1, Now that you know the facts, what can you do? The image is a sketch of
Kenya with a red ribbon wrapped around it.
fig. 9 Nairobi Participant 2 (PAXA B): phase 3, step 6; nal prototype of design object
for concept 1, Now that you know the facts, what can you do? The left image is an
illustration of Kenya with a red ribbon wrapped around it. In a nal group critique on
July 18, 2003, the Kenyan participant who designed this poster received the following
comments and suggestions for change: Use a diKerent picture with more people talking,
to show that there is a dialogue going on between the people [i.e., Kenyans]. Why should the
names of the town be on the map? Below the text Lets Talk about It, it was suggested
that she insert a quote extracted from the recording that Rarieya had done. Rarieya added
that this poster could be used as a desktop calendar as a way of disseminating the message.
Another comment was that the spaces left on the side should be more uniform. [The face in
the right image has been disguised at the subjects request. It was not censored in the
nal design.]
fig. 10 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketch of concept 1, All that
glitters is not gold. The image is of people exhibiting risky behavior in an American
bar scene.
figs. 11 and 12 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches of concept 1, All
that glitters is not gold. The image is of man picking up a woman.

Left: fig. 13 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches of concept 1, All
that glitters is not gold. The image is of a man and woman exhibiting risky behavior in
an American bar scene. Right: fig. 14 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail
sketch of concept of AIDS as National Disaster. The image is of a man and woman not
speaking to each other but thinking about the same question, seated around a gourd.
Left: fig. 15 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches of concept of AIDS
as National Disaster.
Right: fig. 16 Kusa Participant 3: phase 2, step 5; thumbnail sketches of concept of
AIDS as National Disaster.
conclusion
This project is unique in its emphasis on making the audience the
co-designer in a participatory approach to graphic design. Other
participatory methods use data collection techniques such as observations,
interviews, and surveys to learn about the target audience for the design,
but may not directly engage the audience in the design process. Our
participatory approach involves the audience directly in the decision-
making activities that aKect the nal output, as well as empower the
audience by giving them control over the design propaganda that aKect
their community, lives, and work. This preliminary research envisions the
control of the design process as lying on a spectrum, where at one extreme
the audience is a dependent spectator in the design process, perhaps
consulted to derive audience information, and at the other extreme the
audience is an independent, central, and active design participant in
communication campaigns. In the case of other collaborative graphic
design processes, the audiences role is consultant; in this special case of
participatory design, the audience is the designer. Our participatory
approach increased the participants training and independence. In fact,
some of them can now go on to become local graphic designers.
The project generated a small number of campaign poster
prototypesdesigned by Kenyansthat in the future could be put to use
in Kenya on a large scale coupled with a mechanism to measure the
eKect of the campaign on HIV and AIDS awareness and prevention in
Africa. It will also be useful and necessary to compare the posters produced
with our participatory graphic design process with those produced in
other kinds of participatory and collaborative processes along with the
traditional intuitive approach to design, in order to determine the
eKectiveness of our participatory graphic design approach.
This article describes a research project that was awarded a $50,000 seed grant by
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutes Ogce of Research.

notes
1. James Kiwanuka-Tondo and Leslie B. Snyder, The Inuence of Organizational

Characteristics and Campaign Design Elements on Communication Campaign
Quality: Evidence from 91 Ugandan AIDS Campaigns, Journal of Health
Communication 7, no. 1 (2002): 59.
2. For a discussion of participatory design, see Douglas Shuler and Aki Namioka,
Participatory Design: Principles and Practice (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1993);
Todd Cherkasky, et al., eds., Designing Digital Environments: Bringing in More Voices;
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, November 2000, CUNY (New
York: CPSR, 2000); and Brenda Laurel, ed., Design Research: Methods and
Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). For user-centered graphic design,
see Jorge Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design: Mass Communications and Social
Change (Bristol: Taylor & Francis, 1997); and for CoDesigning, see Stephen
Scrivener, Linden J. Ball, and Andree Woodcock, eds., Collaborative Design:
Proceedings of CoDesigning 2000 (London: Springer Verlag, 2000).
3. Ronnie Lipton, Designing across Cultures: How to Create EKective Graphics for
Diverse Ethnic Groups (Cincinnati: How Design Books, 2002).
4. See Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York: The Guilford Press,
1995).
5. Michael D. Warren, Jan L. Slikkerveer, and David Brokensha, eds., The Cultural
Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (London: Intermediate
Technology Publications, 1995).
6. See Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern
India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
7. David Berlo, The Process of Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1960).
8. Philip B. Meggs, Type & Image: The Language of Graphic Design (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1992), 4.
9. According to Abbe Don and JeK Petrick in their article User Requirements, in
Laurel, ed., Design Research, technographics refers to the technological
characteristics and literacy of the target audience. For instance, which computers,
cell phones, PDAs, operating systems, etc., does the target market use?
10. See http://www.rpi.edu/~bennett/dlb.pdf.
11. Susan M. Kegeles, Robert B. Hays, Lance M. Pollak, and Thomas J. Coates,
Mobilizing Young Gay and Bisexual Men for HIV Prevention: A Two-Community
Study, AIDS 13 (1999): 175362.
Section III
D E S I G N I N G C U LT U R E
chapter 13
Graphic Design in a
Multicultural World
KATHERINE MCCOY
At a conference in London in this past year, a leading British designer

lamented the pronounced decrease of corporate design projects coming
into design ogces. He blamed the computer, which has enabled lower-
level para-professionals to do the work of professional designers.
Certainly corporate design systems, with their templates for identity
programs and collateral materials, enables much corporate design work
to be automated, with the designer replaced by computer. There is
rewarding and lucrative work for the designers of corporate design
systems, but not for individual pieces. These systems typically stress
consistency, and wherever consistency is a prime value, design can be
computer-standardized. This may signal the end of mainstream
corporate communications as the staple of design ogces and studios.
Graphic designers tend to think of corporate communications as the
core of the elda view substantiated by design competition entries,
the majority of which are mainstream corporate materials. This raises
the question: If corporate design projects are disappearing, does this
mean the end of graphic design?
I would say no, although there is no doubt that the nature of graphic
design practice is changing. New media oKer great opportunities,
including multimedia, CD-ROM publishing, software interface design,
200
and product interaction design. Print communications may soon
represent a lesser proportion of visual communications projects, although,
given the current communications explosion, the actual volume may not
lessen but even increase. It is clear that print communications design
will change, and is already changing. One pronounced trend is toward
specialized audiences, focused messages, and eccentric design languages
tailored to each audiences unique characteristics and culture. The
homogenized corporate audiences that have been the destination of so
much of graphic design may be diminishing.
We seem to be witnessing the end of an era of mass communications:
narrowcasting instead of broadcasting, subcultures instead of mass
culture, and tailored products instead of mass production. Professor
Patrick Whitney of Illinois Institute of Technology calls this demassication
and predicts that this is a dominant cross-category global trend.
For the past 150 years, design has answered the needs of the
Industrial Revolutions age of mass. Communications and manufacturing
have been based on the economies of scale. Mass production is based on
standardizationone product to solve all peoples needs. The Model-T was
available in any color you wanted as long as it was black. The economies
of mass production reduced diversity and individuality but produced lots
of aKordable goodies. Similarly, the golden age of mass communications
gave us three television networks, with the entire U.S. watching the
same show every Sunday night.
This economic and technological scheme produced the mass society
of the twentieth century. Marxists and early modernists envisioned a
broad socialist proletariat, which actually developed in the Eastern Block
countries. In the United States and Western Europe, vast middle classes
shared values, aspirations, and lifestyles, with remarkably little variation
in income, housing, possessions, and clothing styles.
Our modern design professions were born of the Industrial Revolution.
Modernism, especially at the Bauhaus, was a response to the economies of
scale and standardization in the new mass societies. The design philosophy
of form follows function is based on the standardized processes, modular
systems, industrial materials, and machine aesthetic of minimalist form.
Universal design solutions were sought to solve universal needs across
cultures. Reducing design elements down to their basic formsgeometric
shapes and primary colors, for instancewas seen as a method to make one
201
design solution appropriate for all users. Herbert Bayers Universal typeface
reected this ideal in both form and name; more recently Frutigers Univers
strove to give us a universal system of type fonts that would fulll all our
typographic needs. The systematic grids of the Swiss School follow the
same universalist idealism. But now two new forces are breaking up the
mass society and the mass-production economy.
High technology is bringing us computer-aided/computer-controlled
design and manufacturing, and robotics in highly automated factories
are able to tailor products very specically to individual preferences.
Powerful new electronic communications technologies enable complex
channeling in cable television and magazines with an explosion of
special-interest programming and publishing. Advertising and marketing
are ever more precisely targeted to specic consumers. Online home
shopping will magnify this trend immensely.
Highly channeled communications and tailored products answer
the needs of the explosion of subcultures born of the values revolution
of the late 1960s. Ethnic awareness and pride now counter the American
tradition of assimilation. This is a global trend, with news of separatist
movements and splinter groups breaking up the former Eastern Block,
Europe, Africa, and Mexico bombarding us daily. These newly developed
values of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity create a world of
subculturesgroups focused on specialized interests and values.
Thousands of transgeographic communities are linked through
global communications: clusters of individuals otherwise unconnected
focus around religious, moral, and social issues, business concerns,
spectator sports, recreation, and hobbies ranging from stamp collectors,
y shermen, and survivalists to parents of children killed by drunk
drivers, gray panthers, anti-abortion agitators, and rain forest defenders.
Even corporations are decentralizing into entrepreneurial units and
subcultures in the new leaner/meaner downsized corporation. The
economics of production and communication, and the character of culture
and society, now lead to diversication, decentralization, downsizing,
dispersion, and even disunity. The economy of scale in mass production
and mass communications gave us a producer-centered system. Now the
economy of choice in tailored production and communications gives us a
user-centered system with tailored products, tailored communications,
and targeted channels.
202 D E S I G N S T U D I E S : D E S I G N I N G C U LT U R E
This is nothing less than a revolution, with far-reaching implications
for designers. We must understand each of our audiences. We must
understand their values. We must speak and read their language, even in
the literal sense, such as Spanish or Braille. Specialized audiences often
communicate in vernacular languages or technical jargon. Rhetorical
styles vary radically from low-key to in-your-face, from colloquial to
formal. This is true for visual style languages and symbolic visual codes
as well. If we are to create meaningful and resonant communications,
we must give appropriate new character to a more varied, idiosyncratic,
and even eccentric graphic design expression.
The entire communications equation of sendermessagereceiver
needs to be reconsidered. Our Bauhaus modernist design heritage
focused on scientically and aesthetically clear communication of
the message. And our current design practices so often center on the
needs of the ever-present and omnipotent client. As professional
designers, we have developed an eKective body of theory, method, and
form to deal with both the sender and message. Now we must do the
same for the receiver component of the communications equation.
In thinking about these revolutions, I looked at my own work and found
an evolution away from mass communicationsbased modernism.
I found some serious mistakes in tailoring messages to audiences,
demonstrating that this is not necessarily a simple process. Then I
began to look for work that might be evidence of the impact of these
technological and societal changes on print communications today
in the U.S. I have been looking for work done for clients on a fee basis,
evidence that one can base a design practice on tailored subculture
communications.
One specialized audience has always been other graphic
designersdesign for designers. Paper company promotions and more
recently cutting-edge magazines like Emigre have provided graphic
designers with opportunities for idiosyncratic graphic expressions.
Design communications for other design professionals (architects,
fashion designers, and furniture companies, for instance) and museums
and cultural events have also focused on specialized audiences. But
these are all culturally related subjects and cultured audiences. These
are the traditional audiences for out-of-the mainstream graphic design,
and do not really represent a trend to new subculture communications.
M C C O Y: G R A P H I C D E S I G N I N A M U LT I C U LT U R A L W O R L D 203
A more meaningful trend is the recent increase of design
communications directed to industry employee groups. These
communications frequently encourage unique work-related identities in
their employee communities. Another wide range of targeted graphic
design is the category of talking to techies. Graphic design for digital
enthusiasts includes software companies and magazines like Wired. The
future-orientation and rapid obsolescence rate of high technology tends
to stimulate innovative, provocative, and risky graphic design solutions.
Music and entertainment business people and audiences also
stimulate highly expressive graphic design work. Style is important to
this industry, and musical artists often demand highly stylized graphic
interpretations. Age-oriented communications is a key example of the
newly specialized nature of audiences, including retirees, postwar baby
boomers, Generation X, and the toddler market. Generational diKerences
are being determined by time increments of ten years or less, with
distinctly diKerent values held by each generational entity.
Specialized languages are frequently required by specialized
audiences. The sight-impaired require a Braille alphabet, and recent
immigrant groups are better reached by their rst languages. Other
audiences share a knowledge of unique vernaculars or jargon which
communicate very clearly to their subcultures.
Specialized audiences possess specialized knowledge not shared
by others. EKective communications can often celebrate this by omission
as well as inclusion. Omitting information generally understood by
a subculture but not by others creates a sense of belonging among a
specialized audience. Attitude is essential. Probably more than any other
project, the Burton Snowboard catalogs by Jager DiPaola Kemp Design
of Burlington, New Hampshire, demonstrate masterful design tailored to
a highly specialized audience. Their market is a cross-breed of skiers,
skateboarders, and rollerbladers that fall within a fairly well-dened age
range. This audience speaks a vernacular language in a highly cool rhetorical
style most of us cannot understand. This studios eccentric graphic
solutions cultivate an underground image while delivering a technical
message in an irreverent, intelligent, satirical, and totally appropriate
manner. Audience-tailored design should reect the visual languages of
its audiences, and can be quite unconventional in contrast to the
professional design idioms of the moment. Rather, it reects the nature
of its audience. It should be noted that most of the current high-quality
graphic work for subcultures seems to be for audiences that value
unconventional visual expressions, but this will not always be the case.
Audience-oriented design considers the viewing and reading
context and environment. Is it private or public, reective or active? Is
there competition from other channels? Consider the audiences values,
belief systems, biases, preconceptions, experiences, mood, and attitude.
Will they be receptive, neutral, or hostile? Lifestyle, personal style, and
communication style vary widely from one audience to the next.
Rhetorical customs and proportional verbal/nonverbal emphasis vary.
Language preferences, formal language uency, vernaculars, and jargon
are central to eKective communication. Literacy levels vary including
reading levels and experience in decoding visual symbols and imagery.
Audience-oriented design requires the designer to establish an empathy
with ones audience, to buy into their frame of reference. This can
happen to such an extent that a designer may choose to specialize in
audience areas natural to ones own interests and values, such as
fashion, music, or sports.
Designers must become the audiences advocate. We cannot count
on univalent and monotone mass communications methods to answer
the needs of many graphic design problems. While we must not neglect
the rst and second components of the sendermessagereceiver
equation, we must respond to the full potential of audience diKerentiation
and diversity to shape and enrich the senders expression and the
messages coding.
First published in How Magazine (April, 1995).
M C C O Y: G R A P H I C D E S I G N I N A M U LT I C U LT U R A L W O R L D 205
chapter 14
Encoding Advertisements:
Ideology and Meaning in
Advertising Production
MAT THEW SOAR
Obviously people invent and produce adverts, but apart from the
fact that they are unknown and faceless, the ad in any case does
not claim to speak for them, it is not their speech.
judith williamson
Stripping away the veil of anonymity and mystery would by itself
be of great value in demystifying the images that parade before
our lives and through which we conceptualize the world and our
role within it. s u t j h a l ly
I am a fan of advertising. At its best, it is clearly one of the most lively

venues of contemporary creativity, and this is the chief reason I
embarked, in 1989, on a short-lived career as an advertising art director
in London, England. The experience turned out to be enormously
frustrating in creative terms, and, in 1993, I escaped to Vancouver,
Canada, in search of something more fullling. It was only after I
stumbled into a local university course about advertisingrather than
how to do itthat my eyes were opened to a whole arena of critical
ideas about this institution, beginning with Judith Williamsons seminal
book Decoding Advertisements. The more I read, the more I was able to
build a complex picture of advertising as if seen from above: a discourse
206
through and about objects1 that skillfully, relentlessly, oKers goods and
services as the only solutions to our most deeply felt needs and wants: to
be loved and desired, fullled, comfortable, and happy.
The two quotations above are indicative of two opposing and
apparently incompatible views about how to assess the cultural and
political import of advertising, and it was this paradox that fueled my
own initial contribution to these scholarly debates. I felt that advertising
production and advertising creatives had been routinely overlooked, but
were key to a better understanding of advertisings role in shaping our
culture. Whereas Jhally advocated a line of inquiry that includes the
production of image-based culture, Williamsons inuential argument
is founded on the assertion that this is a futile strategy, that an informed
analysis of the advertising text is the best way to advance our
understanding of one of the most important cultural factors moulding
and reecting our life today.2
Of course, the question of authorship, however broadly dened, is
a familiar enough conundrum in the study of art and literature. In the
context of commercial institutions, however, authorship is often implicitly
treated as a non-issue, given the obvious existence of signicant
organizational and functional constraints. For example, within the
sociology of news, Noam Chomsky argued that you could nd that
ninety-nine percent of the journalists are members of the Socialist
Workers Party . . . and that in itself would prove nothing about the
medias output.3 For Chomsky, the form and content of news is largely
dependent on issues of ownership and control.
The scholarly evidence available suggests that the critical study of
advertising has been overwhelmingly biased in favor of textual approaches.
This bias may simply be a matter of priorities. At the limit, however,
important questions remain unspoken and unanswered. An appreciation
of this commercial culture of production,4 however inconsequential it
may appear to our understanding of ideology, strengthens the
explanatory force of critical cultural inquiry, understood as a holistic
practice involving various points of entry, modes of analysis, and types
of intervention.
Although my focus is on ad creatives and designers, the aim here is
not merely to democratize our research agendas, perhaps adding
commercial cultural production to the existing, prevalent concentration
207
on the text and reception. These particular cultural workers do not
exclusively hold the key to origination or ultimate authorial intention, but
their role in the advertising and design process is of primary importance.
By working against the narrow approach advocated by Williamson, my
goal here is to show the ways in which such workers embody some
remarkable paradoxes, not least of which is their primary attentiveness to
an audience of peers rather than a putative set of consumers at large.
Furthermore, the class position and dynamic of these particular workers
can be understood as characterized by uncertainty and instability, making
the notion that advertising and design are a homogeneous forcea
culture industrythat much harder to justify or accept.5
a model: the circuit of culture

In an interview published in 1986, the pioneering cultural critic Raymond
Williams called for a range of analytical approaches to the study of
culture. Among these, he argued that the least developed . . . is that
which tries to understand precisely the production of certain
conventions and modes of communication right inside the form. He
also suggested that this was the least likely thing to happen.6 That
same year, the cultural studies scholar Richard Johnson proposed, under
the title What Is Cultural Studies Anyway? a theoretical model called
the circuit of culture (fig. 1 ).7 Although not necessarily a comment on or
even a response to Williamss statement, the circuit oKered a way to
bring together the broadened analysis to which Williams alluded. More
important, Johnson recognized that no single approach, and hence no
single vantage point on his circuit, can in itself provide the kind of far-
reaching analysis that, for him, constituted cultural studies. The circuit
also provides an excellent way of bringing to light those items on
Williamss list that have historically been neglected.
The model indicates that we must take account of all four moments
identied by Johnson: production; the text; consumption; and lived
cultures and social relations.8 The study of advertising in particular
has concentrated largely on the text, and scholarly attention to
commercial cultural production remains, for a variety of reasons, an
underexplored, obscured, and even maligned strategy.
We have witnessed the emergence of audience research within
cultural studies and associated concerns with the myriad issues of
cultural receptionin short, decoding. Stuart Halls essay Encoding/
Decoding has been particularly inuential in this respect, yet the rst
half of his couplet, encoding, cannot be said to have helped to foster a
similarly fruitful line of inquiry, let alone a canon.9
An emphasis on issues concerning the text and its reception has led
to the exploration of our amusements, preoccupations, fears, allegiances,
and pleasuresthat is, on meaning-making outside the realm of work.
This has often been a purposeful and indeed fruitful strategy in scholarly
research, but it has also led, perhaps unconsciously, to a cumulative
disregard for that sizeable and formative chunk of time most people
devote to labor. Furthermore, this activity is not necessarily outside the
scope of cultural studies.10
In exploring the four elements of his circuit, Johnson concentrated
on the conception, design, production, marketing, and reception of a
new compact car as his example.11 In that spirit, I propose an adaptation
of the model that may provide a better account of the activities of ad
personnel (particularly copywriters and art directors) and graphic
designers. This will serve to clarify the least explored sections of
Johnsons circuit by drawing specic attention to the subjective aspects
of commercial cultural production. Ultimately, such an argument may
apply to a whole range of workersa provisional list might include
packaging, fashion, industrial, and retail-display designers; style
journalists; photographers; lm and TV directors; screenwriters;
typographers; actors, models, and popular musicians; and computer
animators and webpage designers, to name just a fewcollectively
identied by Pierre Bourdieu as the new cultural intermediaries.12
on semiotics
Auteurism is surely dead, but so are the debates over the death of
the author. In the current climate, few people would doubt the
value of asking: Who is writing? or Who is speaking?
j a m e s n a r e m o r e 13
Advertisements, if we take them seriously and collectively as a social and

cultural phenomenon, are a rich source of ideas, both about and for the
world we inhabitalbeit habitually rareed, heavily mediated, and often
distorted. Scholars of many persuasions have turned to ads to illuminate
SOAR: ENCODING ADVERTISEMENTS 209

and develop their research: they have been classied historically;
analyzed according to product category, such as cigarettes, toys,
cosmetics, jeans, or political valence; assessed for their underlying
ideological or fetishistic inexions; and scrutinized according to their
specic portrayal of men, women, and children.
With Decoding Advertisements, Williamson produced probably the
best known and most referenced work on the signifying practices
embedded in advertisements. Its text-centered orthodoxy (and
concurrent militantism toward authorship) was informed by the work of
Roland Barthes, who, as a leading semiotician, warned against any
attempt to account for the supposed intentions of the producers (authors)
of any message (text). Barthes asserted that to try to nd the sources,
the inuences of a work, is to fall in with the myth of liation.14
The danger is that, as Johnson has noted, at the limit, this approach
tend[s] to derive an account of readership, in fact, from the critics own
textual readings.15 Perhaps the most important elision is that by following
the semioticians logic, we are then unable to account for change;
because any notion of putative authorship is ruled out of bounds, there
is no credible way to explain, for example, how the strategies and
content of advertising messages have developed over the last century.
I am not arguing against the usefulness of semioticsfar from it.
Rather, I subscribe to the notion of a theoretical and methodological
agnosticism that, for example, recognizes the enormous analytic power
of semiotics but refuses the dogmatic overtures that have often
attended it.16 To illustrate: William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally
developed a method for ad analysis that combines semiotics with
content analysis; apart from anything else, this method provides a more
accessible foothold for those attempting to follow or repeat the work.17
However, at one extreme, the danger always remains that, as the
sociologist Don Slater suggests, [s]uch theories are then used to ignore
the actual social practice of advertising, implying instead that the
ideological structure of language itself can account for the specic
character of advertisements.18 How, then, might we nd a viable
analytical approach that avoids these problems?
beyond dead authors:
advertising as cultural produc tion
One may look at the sociology of news, a more thoroughly studied and
well-established area of research for a useful analogy to the study of
commercial cultural production. Hall, in one of his lesser-known essays,
provided a dissection of the process of news production, with particular
emphasis on the use of images.19 Informed by the work of Barthes and
Louis Althusser, Halls argument stressed both the ideological
underpinnings of this site of cultural production and, via semiotics, the
already-inscribed nature of its output. In this compelling frame, the
process of newsmaking is neither arbitrary nor purely denotative.
Halls work can also be distinguished in other important ways. For
example, he made room for subjective inuencesthe possibility that
the semiformal culture of journalism may have some eKect on news
agendas, or at least on the way in which selected stories are framed.
Hall referred, briey, to the social practices or relations of news
production.20 I adapt this part of his analysis to understand the processes
of advertising and design production. To this end, it is suggested at the
outset that ad agencies and especially creative departments bear
comparison with the archetypal newsroom that appears in Halls essay.
The analogy it oKers is therefore partial but no less informative.
The ritual practices of news production, according to Hall, are
the actual routines by which the labour of signication is ordered and
regulated. These in turn are framed by a routinized and habituated
professional know-how, by which Hall meant certain types of
knowledge . . . which enable the signifying process to take place.21 The
routines of news production are analogous to the ad creatives craft:
their practical ability to produce copy (i.e., text) and layouts (i.e., sketches
of how the ad may look) and to bring together the various service functions
to produce an ad, including the talents of illustrators, photographers,
typographers, and lm crews. These activities are informed by a
professional knowledge, a higher order expertise that manifests itself in
the way in which the various elements are combined. This is not, of
course, merely a function of each ad creatives own whims but a complex
blend of constraints and inuences.22 However, this combination of
practicesin sum, the professional know-how of the ad creatives
overlooks one vital aspect of their work.

News production begins with events in the real world, regardless
of whether these events are emphasized out of proportion to their
potential signicance or even ignored entirely. In his article, Hall broke
down the signifying process into successive stages, along with the
various competencies associated with each stage.23 Ad production, on
the other hand, is not so much an accumulation of signications as an
eruption, because the ad creative invents a story where none existed
before. This is why the creative is possibly the most important actor,
ideologically speaking, in the production of ads. OKering up concepts as
if by magic, the ad creatives work is then reied through the routines of
the agency around him. In this sense, the creatives output is analogous
to the news event in Halls frame, although ad creatives in particular may
routinely provide a number of storiesthat is, conceptsfrom which
one is nally chosen through various bureaucratic processes.
This raises a number of questions, such as how ideas are produced,
how well the process can be explained, the inuences (if any) that are
at play, the investment that creatives and designers have in their own
accounts of the process, and the ways in which these views may be
aKected by evidence of the less salutary eKorts of the advertising and
design communities. To begin to address these issues, it is important to
assess ad creatives and designers not just as eminent individuals, be
they celebrated mavericks or even auteurs, but as a social stratum.
the children of marx and coca-cola: a brief history

of the cultural intermediaries
[The executives, or cultural intermediaries] know how hip,
British pop culture works, and because they have hung on to it long
enough to see it wasnt going to cause a revolution, they can sell
the knowledge with a clear conscience. Theyre largely why the
mainstream appropriates the underground so quickly nowtheres
a fth column of thirtysomethings selling the battle plans to the
businessmen and politicianswho are eager to buy, of course,
because hip youth culture is new and old doesnt work.
r i c h a r d b e n s o n 24
It is now thirty years since Daniel Bell set out to explain the cultural
contradictions of capitalism.25 In light of what he saw as the
characteristically excessive tendencies of mass consumption, Bell argued
that the perpetuation of investment in mass production might ultimately
be insugcient to ensure capitals stability.
Furthermore, Bell identied a social constituency he referred to
as the cultural mass, whose members were mainly to be found in the
knowledge and communications industries [and] who, with their
families, would number several million persons.26 Inner circles within
this group were to be distinguished further by their particularly
heightened cultural attunement. Bells inventory included writers . . .
movie-makers, musicians, and those in higher education, publishing,
magazines, broadcast media, theater, and museums.27 He located the
emergence of this loose agliation in the decline of the avant-garde:
Today modernism is exhausted. There is no tension. The
creative impulses have gone slack. It has become an empty
vessel. The impulse to rebellion has been institutionalized by
the cultural mass and its experimental forms have become
the syntax and semiotics of advertising and haute couture.28
This appropriately named mass (unfairly) enjoys the status of artists
and the trappings of bourgeois society, according to Bell: they have the
luxury of freer lifestyles while holding comfortable jobs; moreover,
they are not the creators of culture but the transmitters; they merely
process and inuence the reception of serious cultural products, and
only then does this group produce the popular materials for the wider
mass-culture audience.29
The relative legitimacy of the cultural mass appears to depend on
how the particular formulation of this shift is conceived. For example, a
more positive conceptualization is to be found in the work of Mike
Featherstone. Reworking and updating Bells assertions in the early
1990s, he characterized the new cultural intermediaries as those in
media, design, fashion, advertising, and para intellectual information
occupations, whose jobs entail performing services and the production,
marketing and dissemination of symbolic goods.30 It is important to
note, however, that whereas for Bell the so-called cultural mass seems
to emerge as an eKect of the corrosive force of modernism, for
Featherstone, the new cultural intermediaries are rather more signicant.31
Jim McGuigan asserts that the intermediaries have emerged from
the radical middle-class youth of the 1960s,32 although for them

[r]esistance is reduced to the knowing consumption of consumer
products.33 The ultimate indictment came from the social and political
theorist Alex Callinicos, who, borrowing an earlier phrase coined by
Jean-Luc Godard, branded them children of Marx and Coca-Cola.34
from commercial artists to cultural intermediaries

We are now in a position to consider advertisements, logos, brochures,
commercials, compact disc covers, and so forth as the contrived and
somewhat reective communications of an obscure elite, whose
members continually attempt to bridge the paradox between their
artistic impulses and the economic constraints to which they are tied.
The geographer David Harvey characterized creatives by the slightly
sinister trait of feeding on serious cultural products and then
producing (excreting) popular materials for the wider mass-culture
audience.35 Featherstone, although acknowledging that they may
indeed be cultural plunderers, detected a certain predicament in
propagating their elite provincialism:
Their habitus, dispositions and lifestyle preferences are such
that they identify with artists and intellectuals, yet under
conditions of the demonopolization of artistic and intellectual
commodity enclaves they have the apparent contradictory
interests of sustaining the prestige and cultural capital of
these enclaves, while at the same time popularizing and
making them more accessible to wider audiences.36
We may thus contrast a conception of ad creatives (and designers, etc.)
as culture vultures with the notion of cultured vultures. Both
formulations compare favorably with Jackson Learss description of the
people who have been associated with advertising:
These artists and writers have served, in a sense, as emissaries
between social universes: the agencyclient world and the wider
population; art and big business; museum and commercial
culture. They have worked various boundaries, sometimes
creatively reconnecting aesthetics and everyday life, more often
conforming out of necessity to the constraints of agency
organization.37
Bourdieu goes further, arguing that ad creatives are both constituents
of a social stratum characterized by the work it performs, involving
presentation and representation,38 and consumers, that is, class-based
faction and taste culture. More specically, he claims that
the new petite bourgeoisie is predisposed to play a vanguard
role in the struggles over everything concerned with the art of
living, in particular, domestic life and consumption, relations
between the sexes and the generations, the reproduction of
the family and its values.39
This vanguard role is achieved and maintained most forcefully through
the values and attitudes purveyed through advertising and design
images and through which the intermediaries can most clearly be
understood as having an authorial function.
professional perspec tives on advertising

and design produc tion
To understand better the inuences, expectations, and aspirations of the
intermediaries and how these supplement the theoretical accounts so
far developed, I turn to a consideration of the creative workers to be
found in the businesses of design and advertising. Although they rarely
wear their ideological contradictions on their sleeves, ad creatives and
designers nevertheless embody a very particular paradox. Although
habitually laying claim to the spontaneity, freedom of expression, and
originality that the term creative implies, they are also ideological
participants whose professional routines demarcate their output in very
precise terms.
These intermediaries are constituted as an ever-vigilant audience
through their professional appetite for media products. Indeed, there is
some connection between the cultural and social experiences of
copywriters, art directors, and graphic designers and the apparently
spontaneous solutions they provide on a daily basis for the clients their
organizations serve, quite apart from some putative audience.40
methodology
The empirical research presented here is drawn from a total of nine
interviews. Five were conducted in 1993 in Los Angeles,41 and the others
were conducted in New York and Massachusetts in 1997. These
interviews are contextualized with secondary sources such as excerpts
from other interviews and trade articles, by the likes of Michael

Schudson, Karen Shapiro, and others.42 I also draw, implicitly at least, on
my own experience as a graphic designer and art director. The 1993
interviews were conducted with senior ad creatives, here referred to as
Bert, John, Steve, Colin, and Rick (all pseudonyms), who
provided some authoritative views on the professional beliefs and day-
to-day activities of established art directors and copywriters. The more
recent set of interviews deals with two ad creatives, Mike and Ben,
and two graphic designers, Mary and Karl, and reects part of an
ongoing eKort to extend my research beyond advertising to another
major professional group of cultural intermediaries.
Eight of the nine interviewees are white men, most middle-aged
(although the youngest is twenty-nine), all with extensive educations: John
has a degree in journalism with a minor in advertising; Steve has a double
major in English and marketing; Colin took a marketing degree with a
minor in advertising; and Rick has a graduate degree in English. Mary
and Karl are successful graphic designers who run their own businesses:
Mary is self-employed, complementing her design work with advertising,
depending on client needs; Karl is a creative director and has a large staK
working mainly on a folio of mass-circulation, family-oriented magazines.
Based on their levels of experience, all interviewees can be described,
in industry parlance, as middleweights or heavyweights. Indeed, the ve
men interviewed in 1993 had all attained at least the senior rank of
creative director. The participants were all very forthcoming, often using
anecdotes, examples, and jokes to illustrate their comments.
My ndings rarely contradict the empirical evidence presented
in other studies, although the arguments they support may diKer
signicantly.43 Moreover, the degree of t with the beliefs expressed by
ad creatives and even the way in which these are phrased in other
studies has, at times, been almost uncanny. For the sake of brevity,
therefore, the evidence presented here is limited to that which directly
impinges on the thesis at hand.
the role of organic research

The preferred criteria by which creatives assess the worth of
advertisements and commercials (both their own and others) are expressly
not those imposed from outside: any kind of quantitative research that
seeks to establish an objective evaluation on completed workknown as
testing the creativeis vehemently renounced by the participants;
according to Steve, no truly innovative idea can ever be tested if its
truly innovative because people wont know how to react to it.44
According to Rick, the information provided in creative briefs,
including psychographic and demographic proles, appears to be used
only as a touchstone once the process of invention is under way.45
Creatives may also seek out personal views, canvassing public opinion
(in this example, about the particular product category in which the
interviewee works): I like to talk to people at the gas pump, Rick
oKered. You know: Nice truck. Why did you buy it? Ben mentioned
having recently looked at an article in Time magazine; Mary remembered
being inspired by a wall display in a university hallway.
Aside from the more obvious examples of practical research such
as this, there is a further and greatly signicant source. Ricks comment
about the truck continued thus: Its fun: were all consumers, were all
consuming something at any point in life. Here is evidence for the
assertion that creatives draw on their experience as consumers at least
as much as any acumen they accumulate through their lives on the job.
Formal training is neither a necessity nor a norm. As one of Schudsons
participants commented in a comparable study published in 1993, I dont
know anything now, after twelve years in the business, I didnt know
when I began, except some technique.46
Karen Shapiros 1981 ethnographic study of four advertising
agencies includes many references to the functional importance of the
peculiar views and tastes of ad creatives.47 This reliance on anything
they encounterin their personal lives as well as in the work setting48
runs from the obvious, such as casting sessions (e.g., a particular woman
was chosen to appear in a commercial because the men responsible . . .
found her attractive and . . . thought that most people in the audience
would also49), to using the product (e.g., to nd benets that they can
then tell consumers about, based on their own experiences50). In the
words of Mike, ad creatives need to understand their time; what the
things are that are motivating people today, what people respond to today,
what people worry about today, what people think is important today.
Ben commented that advertising picks up on the movies; for Colin, if I
see something interesting, if I see some technique done in a movie, I will
always apply that to an advertisement . . . [from] the regular Hollywood,

all the way down to the obscure foreign lms which are not so popular
but you can preen elements from that. This is perfectly illustrated by
the emergence of morphing, an advanced computer technique that
gives the appearance of one object metamorphosing into another,
onscreen. This technique had been popularized in the movie Terminator 2
and was mentioned by nearly all the interviewees as a fad because it had
already become overused in advertising. According to John, another ad
man, its inventing a new technique: inventing something in your head
and then getting someone to go and do it. Its these new ctions. The
ctions are ads that, rather than being derivative, he saw as entirely
original: When someone does it, and when it does work, it puts you so
far above everyone else, so out-distances everyone else, that the power
is just unbelievable.
This organic research begins with ads on television, on the radio,
and in magazines; but at its most intense, there is an expressed need for
total immersion in the cultural environment, as illustrated by John:
Within my creative department you cant name a movie, foreign or
domestic, that someone here hasnt seen; a book that someone hasnt
read. People in our industry thrive on stimulus. Were pretty much in
touch. Steve concurred, noting, You have to be a cultural junkie. Its not
just media, but its radio, its art, fashion, walking down the street, not
living in one place, traveling.
assessing qualit y: the importance of creativit y

The creative directors interviewed are clearly concerned with
safeguarding the quality of output of their departments, and this is
measured in a very particular way, as Colin argued:
If you talk to most creatives, theyre always striving to be
original. Theyre striving to create something that is unlike
anything else that is on the air. It becomes part of your everyday
existence, and so it becomes a given, a mandate, or a credo;
and there are some agencies where creativity has nothing to
do with it. It really depends on who you talk to. I would say
that most good creatives are always striving to be diKerent.
Creativity, therefore, appears to be practically and ideologically a very
powerful notion. According to my interviewees, who generally agreed on
most matters, the creative contribution is indeed pivotal. As Ben
asserted: The creative is the product, and theres nothing in this
business without it. Furthermore, there is little doubt in anyones mind
that a creative ad is a successful ad. The reverse is also true: In response
to a question about good ads and bad ads, they all associated the good
one with creative achievement and the bad one with external interference
or incompetence. When asked, What do you think when you see a good
ad? a typical response (given here by Ben) was Jeez, that was a good
idea; Mary added, I just am awed by the fact that people continually
come up with brilliant, creative ideas. However, when asked, What do
you think when you see a bad ad? the frame of reference changed
noticeably. Ben stated, Boy, howd they ever sell that to a client? and
How could anyone ever have bought this? Marys response was, Oh,
wow, people are spending money on thatI cant believe it.
It appears that, for these creatives, a good ad is in fact a well-
conceived idea for which the creative person can take direct credit. For
Mary a good ad is evidence of a client that allowed a creative to do their
job, as opposed to money well spent or an ad expertly placed in the media
or professionally managed. Furthermore, a bad ad is evidence, a priori,
of a bad client, lousy account handling, or wasted money. Nowhere was
it suggested that a bad ad may be the result of poor creative work.
There is also a major emphasis on creativity as a transcendent,
ethereal process. As Karl said, I just know that the little muse is gonna
show her face, before the deadline. Even Mike, my jaundiced
intervieweea 55-year-old who had relinquished day-to-day creative
work for a role as a creative managersaid, Theres always something
nebulous about really what they do, I suspect they dont understand it
themselves particularly. Ben maintained that there is no one-plus-one-
equals-two, and Mary went to great pains to explain a process
reminiscent of that of a medium at a seance: I believe its a matter of
being open to receiving inspiration . . . . Ive learned to trust that itll
come . . . its just being open to it.51
All the responses underline the need for creatives and creativity,
whether explicitly or by insinuation. More important, this valorization
does not extend to the ultimate audience, the consumer. Rarely, if
ever, is the discourse on good and bad ads located in the realm of
eKectiveness. This may be surprising were it not for the fact that award-
winning work is the single most important asset that a career-minded

creative can have: an award is a measuring stick, a salary-getter, according
to Steve; Bert elaborated, you make your bones, you get your award,
you get some press, and then you merchandise it to get a better job.
The evident commitment to some kind of holy grail of originality,
institutionalized in a number of national and international creative
awards programs, was summed up by Bert, who is the highest-ranking
creative director at a major international agency:
The bottom line aKects us, but there is one thing that creative
people have that the rest of the business people and the
business dont have, and thats ego gratication. To win an
award in our business doesnt mean much to a client; they
dont give a shit if you win an award. If anything, theyll think
thats all you want to do: win awards. What they dont realize is
thats the great motivation for a creative person. Were here to
make a salary, but its also to be respected by [our] peers for
work that has made the people [i.e., consumers] hopeful, made
the people crazy.
This view was taken to its logical extreme by two of the interviewees,
who clearly felt that sales are secondary, if not irrelevant. When asked if
eKectiveness is a criteria for brilliance, John replied,
No. I think that creative people admire a lot of advertising, and
they dont really care if its successful in a pure sense of
whether it moved products oK the shelves. I think creative
people look at advertising in a pure sense: do they think its a
fresh approach?
In consideration of a question regarding the criteria used to judge the
submissions for creative awards competitions, Steve said, What they
call great advertising, I would call great advertising. It has nothing to do
with sales. It has to do with whats the work like, how does it feel?
The apparent chasm between the pursuit of sales eKectiveness and
creative excellence is particularly noticeable in the orientation of awards
schemes. Whereas creatives clearly value ads themselves, clients
generally do not; in sum, eKectiveness and creative innovation can be
achieved independently of one another, due to the varied personal
utilities of the produced advertisement.52 At least one of my
interviewees reiterated the generally regarded belief that these two
categories tend to produce mutually exclusive winners, although, as
Elizabeth Hirschman also notes, occasionally the same advertisement
may fulll both sets of goals.53 The picture that begins to emerge is of a
microculture within the advertising industry that clearly functions at a
tangent to the supposed mission of the business as a whole.
ad genesis: the short circuit

The primary audience of consumers was so distant, and evidences
of its approval so impersonal and uncertain, that the creative elite
became heavily dependent on this secondary audience of
colleagues . . . the most powerful audience was other advertising
professionals. r o l a n d m a r c h a n d 54
The argument has been made that there is a pedagogic function in

advertising and design, in which private codes are disseminated to a
broader cultural mass via the creatives. As perfect consumers operating
in a particularly rareed social milieu, their own cultural readings are
highly attuned. They also consume ads and design concepts written by
other people, sometimes in hypercritical ways; they consume award-
winning and controversial campaigns; and they gravitate toward any
number of fashionable cultural watering holes that provide sustenance,
inspiration, or even rip-oK material. These sources are inevitably subject
to a high level of turnover in the constant movement toward new
experiences, styles, or graphic looks but have included magazines such
as The Face, club culture, and lm scenes or music videos.
Given this assertion, Johnsons description of lived cultures
formerly assumed to refer to consumers in generaltakes on a very
particular signicance. He wrote of:
the existing ensembles of cultural elements already active
within particular social milieux . . . and the social relations on
which these combinations depend. These reservoirs of
discourses and meanings are in turn raw material for fresh
cultural production. They are indeed among the specically
cultural conditions of production.55
The so-called children of Marx and Coca-Cola can nally be located as a
producing and consuming cohort that acts, at least in the latter realm, as
an autonomous or self-addressing entity. The members of this group
draw sustenance from their own ranks, from the work of other cultural

intermediaries. Collaboration among them is common. Art directors
habitually call on the expertise of photographers, illustrators, and
typographers; photographers work with stylists, models, and model-
makers; producers of lms, ads, and television shows depend on
orchestrated collaborations of writers, art directors, actors, set
designers, costume designers, musicians, and animators.
A second level of activity involves the handling, sometimes at a
distance, of one intermediarys work by several others. Advertising is
again an illuminating example: the creative team provides a promotional
platform for a commodity that probably has already been the result of
successive involvements by product or industrial designers, and then by
packaging designers with illustrators, photographers, and typographers.
The work of the ad creatives may then be augmented by other
fig. 1 A theoretical model: the circuit of culture, Richard Johnson.
promotional activities such as in-store displays involving point-of-sale
designers and retail display designers, sales promotions involving art
directors and copywriters working with a similar number of intermediaries,
and direct marketing involving art directors, copywriters, and even
webpage designers.
In Johnsons formulation, the circuit represented a way of
understanding the production and circulation of subjective forms (see
fig. 1).56 It also concerned, in its latter moment, the realm of public
consumption, and by inference an unspecied consumer. Johnson views
cultural consumption as a production process in which the rst product
becomes a material for fresh labourthat is, from text-as-produced to
text-as-read.57 However, we can also consider a secondary, privatized
loop that falls short of the more usual pattern. This I call the short
circuit, and it is one in which the cultural intermediaries act as producers
and consumers (fig. 2 ). This circuit of meaning is short in two senses:
most obviously it is faster, suggesting that the cultural capital so carried
is channeled back around to the intermediaries en masse long before it
works its way into and through the public domain; furthermore, the
notion of an electrical short circuit provides for the idea that this
attenuated arrangement is perhaps detrimental to the functionality of
Johnsons larger, more conventional circuit.
fig. 2 The short circuit, based on Johnsons circuit of culture

I readily acknowledge that, in countering the conation of text and
production, there is an attendant danger of conating creativity with
originality. This is a pitfall we would do well to avoid. As it happens, Barthes
reminded us that a text is a variety of writings, none of them original:
. . . a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres
of culture . . . . [T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is
always anterior, never original . . . . [T]he inner thing he thinks
to translate is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words
only explainable through other words, and so on indenitely.58
Having at the outset rejected the dogmatic overtures of semiotics,
I think we can still draw a valuable lesson from Barthess assertion.
Although it is conceivable that an ad creative or designer may see his or
her own work as entirely without precedent, the fact remains that there
are fundamental expectations among clients, ad executives, and
audiences that make such an absolutist position untenable, if not plain
ludicrous. Rather, we should treat these putative authors as neither dead
nor omnipotent. Their output is no more derivative of a ready-formed
dictionary than it is conjured up from the ether, sui generis.
A clue to the resultant conundrum may lie in the habitual claims
made in the name of creativity. At the limit, this capacity or gift, this
frustratingly nebulous process, simply acts as a kind of ideological
smokescreen: it shields the intermediaries, particularly ad creatives,
from the potential epiphany that their endeavors may merely be the
prosaic, artless instruments of capital accumulation, and it deects
societal scrutiny away from the self-same discovery, planting it instead
in the ever-attractive spectacle of charisma, showmanship, and
entertainment.
Furthermore, the distinct impression given in the interviews is that
these people are all, paradoxically, unique and original thinkersa
community of mavericks. This may be necessary, because the alternative
is for them to understand themselves as part of a process, a systematic
set of representations in which individual ads are not so much personal
gestures as ideologically predetermined contributions to this product-
and service-oriented discourse. It is perhaps this paradox, above all, that
deserves further investigation.
conclusions
The study of visual form and language is limited if it does not
consider the forces of cultural production, which involve a set of
social relations between producer and audience.
a n d r e w h o wa r d 59
I am still a fan of advertising; it would be churlish to claim otherwise.

That said, as a career option and as a creative practice it was never able
to oKer me the depth of insight that is available through the critical
literature on advertising; indeed, I feel justied in saying that I now
understand advertising in a rather more profound sense than I ever did
actually working in the business. I often enjoy new ads and commercials,
but I am also acutely aware of the broader role of advertising, and
especially of ad creatives, in perpetuating a promotional culture that
knows our most intimate needs and desires, but can only ever oKer the
buying of things as a solution.
Members of the cultural intermediaries occasionally publish
interventions that serve to crystallize issues extending beyond the
immediate realm of professional accountability and that attempt to
grapple with more profound subject matter such as long-term social
responsibility. One such example is the First Things First manifesto,
originally drafted in 1964 by a British designer who was, along with
twenty-one supporters, intent on countering the excesses of advertising.
The manifesto was recently redrafted, with the nominal support of
thirty-three well-known intermediaries, and published in at least six
visual arts periodicals, including Abdusters, Eye, Emigre, and the Journal
of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.60
In a critical article about the original First Things First manifesto,
which also helped to precipitate its renewal, Howard advocated a
similarly spirited approach to working that, through collaborations,
would acknowledge the link between our choices as designers and the
sort of culture we wish to contribute to.61 Howards is an informed
intervention: he berated the eviscerationthe literary raidingof
Barthess work by some schools of design, and took a principled stand
against Benetton, ridiculing its creative director, Oliviero Toscani, for his
unbelievably inane work.62 This is not the blithe commentary of a
cultural worker oblivious to critical thinking or hopelessly mired in some

unied industry position. Still, such arguments are the exception to
business as usual rather than the rule; they are also more common
among designers than they are among ad creatives, at least publicly so.63
These cultural producers must be understood collectively as neither
a monolithic entity nor an entirely apolitical one. From time to time
some attempt the digcult task of reaching beyond an infatuation with
technique and contentperhaps the least that scholars of the media and
culture can do as expert witnesses with potential access to production as
well as lived cultures, consumption, and the text.
Part of our task may be to extend the metaphor of advertising as
a distorted mirror of society reecting back on its audience, because the
intermediaries occupy front-row seats on both sidesproduction and
consumption, encoding and decoding. Regardless of which side of
the mirror they may lurk at any moment, the intermediaries always nd
themselves there rst, at once attered by the spectacle of their own
work and often willfully oblivious to the audiences identied for them by
the contemporary routines of marketing research.
A slightly diKerent version of this essay appeared in Mass Communication &

Society 3, no. 4 (Fall 2000).
acknowledgments
I thank Steve Kline for an earlier opportunity to explore these issues; the organizers of
various conference panels for allowing me to present some of these ideas (Association
for Economic & Social Analysis and Paul du Gay, in particular); Sut Jhally; my anonymous
reviewers; and, nally, Matt McAllister and Sharon Mazzarella for their skilled editing
suggestions.
notes
Epigraph: Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in

Advertising (London: Boyars, 1978), 14; Sut Jhally, Image-based Culture: Advertising and
Popular Culture, in Gail Dines and Jean Humez, eds., Gender, Race and Class in Media
(London: Sage, 1995), 7787.
1. William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising:
Persons, Products and Images of Well-being, 2nd ed. (Scarborough: Nelson Canada,
1990), 5.
2. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 11.
3. The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News, videotape, produced
and directed by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997).
4. Paul du Gay, ed., Production of Culture/Cultures of Production (London: Sage/Open
University, 1997).
5. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (London: Lane,
1972), 121.
6. Raymond Williams, Stephen Heath, and Gillian Skirrow, An Interview with
Raymond Williams, in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 317.
7. Richard Johnson, What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?, Social Text 16 (1986/1987):
3880. The circuit has recently appeared elsewhere in slightly modied formfor
example, in Paul du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony
Walkman (London: Sage/Open University, 1997), 3.
8. Johnson, What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?, 47.
9. Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, in Hall, et al., eds., Culture, Media, Language
(London: Hutchinson, 1980), 12838.
10. Recent studies have begun to demonstrate the value of exploring these apparently
unpromising arenas of research. On the advertising and design front, work on
the realm of production by Paul du Gay, Sean Nixon, Frank Mort, and Marilyn
Crafton Smith, among others, has led the way in opening up important, heretofore
neglected possibilities for fruitful cultural inquiry. See, for example, Sean Nixon,
Advertising Executives as Modem Men: Masculinity and the UK Advertising
Industry in the 1980s, in Mica Nava, et al., eds., Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising
and Consumption (London: Routledge, 1997), 10319; Sean Nixon, Circulating
Culture, in Paul du Gay, ed., Production of Culture/Cultures of Production (London:

Sage/Open University, 1997), 179219; and Marilyn Crafton Smith, Culture Is the
Limit: Pushing the Boundaries of Graphic Design Criticism and Practice, Visible
Language 28 (1994): 298316. Formal objections to such an approach are numerous.
Not least is the question of whether these elite communicators constitute a
social milieu worthy of attention because they are neither subordinated nor
subjugatedin fact, quite the reverse. See Roland Marchand, Advertising the
American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 19201940 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), xix.
11. Johnson, What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?
12. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 366.
13. James Naremore, Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism, Film
Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1990): 20.
14. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 160.
16. I am indebted to Sut Jhally for this insight.
17. Leiss, et al., Social Communication in Advertising.
18. Don Slater, Corridors of Power, in Jaber F. Gubrium and David Silverman, eds., The
Politics of Field Research: Sociology Beyond Enlightenment (London: Sage, 1989), 122.
19. Stuart Hall, The Determinations of News Photographs, Working Papers in Cultural
Studies (Autumn 1972): 5387.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. Ibid., 61.
22. This includes knowledge of current trends in the look of ads (and of lms, magazines,
etc.); an understanding, largely the result of experience, of how the ad concept
will look once it has been printed in a newspaper or shot for a commercial and
therefore what will work technically; an intuition about what will appeal to the
audience in terms of stylization, tone of voice, pacing, use of humor, cultural
references (such as the use of celebrities or inside jokes), and so on.
23. Hall, The Determinations of News Photographs, 6164.
24. Richard Benson, Flexible Friends, The Guardian (February 4, 1999): 2.
25. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976).
26. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20n.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), 19.
31. Ibid., 8. See also Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992).
32. McGuigan, Cultural Populism, 218.
33. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, England:
Polity, 1989).
34. Ibid., 170. See also Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn. Godard coined this phrase in
reference to the young French characters in his 1966 lm Masculin-Feminin.
35. David Harvey, Flexibility: Threat or Opportunity?, Socialist Review 21, no. 1 (1991): 68.
36. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 19.
37. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), 262.
38. Bourdieu, Distinction, 366, 359.
39. Ibid., 366; also quoted in Frances Bonner and Paul du Gay, Thirtysomething and
Contemporary Consumer Culture: Distinctiveness and Distinction, in Roger
Burrows and Catherine Marsh, eds., Consumption and Class: Divisions and Change
(London: Macmillan, 1992), 16683.
40. As Marchand noted, Not only were [ad creators] likely to portray the world they
knew, rather than the world experienced by typical citizens . . . they sometimes
allowed their cultural preferences to inuence their depiction of society.
Advertising the American Dream, xvii.
41. I am indebted to Sut Jhally and Steve Kline for the use of this material.
42. Elizabeth Hirschman, Role-based Models of Advertising Creation and Production,
Journal of Advertising 18, no. 4 (1989); Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy
Persuasion, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993); Karen Shapiro, The Construction of
Television Commercials: Four Cases of Interorganizational Problem-solving
(doctoral diss., Stanford University, 1981). See also Thomas Frank, The Conquest of
Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997); Janice Hirota, Making Products Heroes: Work
in Advertising Agencies, in R. Jackall, ed., Propaganda (New York: NYU Press,
1995), 32950; I. Lewis, In the Courts of Power: The Advertising Man, in P. L.
Berger, ed., The Human Shape of Work: Studies in the Sociology of Occupations (New
York: Macmillan, 1964), 11380; Don Slater, Advertising as a Commercial Practice:
Business Strategy and Social Theory (doctoral diss., Cambridge University, 1985);
and Jeremy Tunstall, The Advertising Man in London Advertising Agencies (London:
Chapman & Hall, 1964).
43. E.g., Hirota, Making Products Heroes; Hirschman, Role-based Models of
Advertising Creation and Production; Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy
Persuasion; Shapiro, The Construction of Television Commercials; Slater,
Advertising as a Commercial Practice; and Slater, Corridors of Power.
44. This sentiment is not uncommon and is faithfully echoed by ad man Robert
Pritikin, in an interview with Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 83.
45. See also Shapiro, The Construction of Television Commercials, 370.
46. Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 85.
47. Shapiro, The Construction of Television Commercials, 278.
48. Ibid., 277.
49. Ibid., 83.
50. Ibid., 48.
51. This introverted approach is apparently favored by very few creative types, and
Steve referred to it derisively as the Trappist monk theory: See nothing and do
nothing and have it all come from within. He added, Personally Ill think that
most subscribe to my school. I hire that way.
52. Hirschman, Role-based Models of Advertising Creation and Production, 4243.
Italics added.
53. Ibid., 51. This is an eternally contentious point, and one that a recent international

survey by Donald Gunn of the Leo Burnett Agency attempted to settle. His
conclusion was that an award-winning ad is more than two-and-a-half times more
likely to sell than one that is not, using an established Burnett maxim that only a third
of brands have a growing market share at any one time. M. Martin, Do Creative
Commercials Sell? Campaign 22 (Sept. 1995).
54. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 82.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 58.
58. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in John Caughie, ed., Theories of
Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul/BFI, 1981), 211.
59. Andrew Howard, There Is Such a Thing as Society, in Michael Bierut, et al., eds.,
Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth, 1997), 199.
60. See Matthew Soar, The Impotence of Being Earnest, AIGA Journal of Graphic
Design 17, no. 3 (1999): 67.
61. Howard, There Is Such a Thing as Society, 200.
62. Ibid., 199, 198.
63. The formal split between designers and ad creatives has been debated for many
years. For a recent example, see Rick Poynor, Design Is Advertising parts 1 and 2,
Eye 29 (Autumn 1998): 4651, and Eye 30 (Winter 1998): 3643.
chapter 15
Directed Storytelling:
Interpreting Experience for Design
SHELLEY EVENSON
Design is about meaning-making. Designers provide the resources people

use to make meaning. But how do they choose what resources to use to
stimulate meaning-making? Throughout the history of design these
choices have been based on solid research or intuition and personal
experience. Often, in the latter case, ideas about what will resonate with
an audience come from a place deep inside that the designer usually
cannot explain. Intuition can be good, but when the designer has little
personal experience in the domain, the intuition cannot be grounded. If
the goal is to produce communications that resonate beyond our own
experience, then we need methods and tools that will help us understand
what is meaningful.
Social scientists also care deeply about understanding how meanings
are made. They have a long-established practice of observing and
participating in a culture in order to try and uncover what people are
doing and what the doing or activity means to them. This practice is
called ethnography.1 Researchers enter a setting and earn enough trust
from the people in the environment to actively participate (as participant-
observers) in the community of practice. Their goal is to connect deeply
with the content and issues that matter to that community and then
document in regular, systematic ways, what is learned and observed.
231
CliKord Geertz, a noted anthropologist, describes one of the jobs
of the ethnographer as to listen to what, in words, in images, in actions,
[people] say about their lives.2 In narrative inquiry, a method used in
social science research, participants tell stories as a way for researchers
to understand and document participants experiences. The educators
Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly bring more than twenty years of
eld research in their very practical and methods-rich approach to
narrative inquiry. They, like John Dewey, focus on the experience. They
suggest that to do research into an experience . . . is to experience it.3
For Clandinin and Connelly, people live stories, and in the telling of
these stories, reagrm them, modify them and create new ones.4 To
them, narrative inquiry is both a method and an area of study.
In the last fteen years, designers have learned to borrow methods
from social scientists. Many designers have found that conducting some
form of ethnographic research can reveal patterns in experience that
they can use to choose more appropriate resources for communication
and meaning-making in design. In his article The Changing Role of
Research, the design researcher Christopher Ireland states that if
designers desire to attract and delight customers or audiences for their
work, they need to understand the people for whom they design.5 The
problem is that conducting ethnographic research often takes a lot of
time and money. Adding time to a schedule or extra staK to a project to
gain deeper understanding is not always an option. How then can
designers conduct research to inform design and increase its potential
for meaning-making? What if they do not have the time or budget to
conduct full-blown immersive ethnographic research?
If what Clandinin and Connelly say is truethat to do research into
an experience . . . is to experience itthen some form of narrative
inquiry can be used to help designers understand beyond their own
intuition and increase their potential to design resources for meaning-
making that are useful, usable, and desirable.
direc ted story telling

I have named the process I use to gather accounts of peoples lives to
inform design directed storytelling. This approach draws upon work in
narrative and contextual inquiry to help designers conduct research on
an experience so they can experience it without having to do long-term
ethnographic research. It is a method that can quickly reveal consistent
patterns in peoples experiences. Knowledge of these patterns can
inuence a designers choices about content, hierarchy, and form, allowing
designs to better resonate with their intended audiences.
Directed storytelling is generally used for conducting research when
the design team really has no other viable option for getting information,
or when a team seeks a starting point for developing a more comprehensive
research plan. The general rule is: if you cannot directly observe
something, use directed storytelling.
preparing for a direc ted story telling session

The ideal number of people to engage in a storytelling session is three:
a person who had an experience that is central to the object of the
design activity (the storyteller); a person to lead the storyteller in their
story (the leader); and nally a third person to document the session
(the documenter). If more people are available, they can also act as
documenters. The more storytellers that can be engaged in the process
(through a series of sessions), the richer the data will be for interpretation
and pattern analysis. It is also helpful to develop a rough guide for the
session that the leader will use to redirect the storytellers if they get stuck.
The leaders guide consists of an opening line such as Tell a story about
the last time you had a memorable communication with someone that was
not co-located with youa communication over a distance. Next, the
guide should address the journalistic framework of who, what, when,
where, and how. To continue with this example, the guide might consist of:
With whom did you communicate [participants]? What did you do
[activity]? When did it happen? Please walk through the process
that you used to make the connection. Was it spontaneous? How
did that work? Did they contact you? How did you know who was
trying to connect with you? How soon did you nd out why they
were contacting you?
Where were you? Did your location inuence the communication
in any way? Were there any artifacts that were particularly helpful
in the communication? Was there any technology involved in the
communication? How did the communication make you feel?
What were the most important aspects of the whole experience?
What made it exciting or challenging [compelling qualities]?
EVENSON: DIRECTED STORYTELLING 233

What other things might be important to people making
connections [relationships]?
conduc ting a story telling session

The research can be conducted almost anywhere as long as all the
participants are available. The session leader asks the storyteller to
begin the story, by asking the subject to recall a specic instance (Tell me
about the last time you had a communication at a distance . . . ), and
encouraging the subject to use props if they are related to the
experience and are at hand. As the story unfolds, the documenter writes
one idea per page (in this particular project, Post-its were used). Ideas
are elements of the story that seem to be important either through the
emphasis that the storyteller has given or through the documenters
own interpretation of the information given by the storyteller. They can
be word-for-word transcriptions, but are most often interpretations of
what is said. The telling and recording continues as long as it takes to
recount the experience.
interpreting the data

In the early 1990s, the human-computer interaction researchers Karen
Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer developed an approach to conducting
interviews with respondents in their own environments that they called
contextual inquiry.6 One step in the process involves the creation of agnity
diagrams for specic types of information gleaned from the interview. The
diagram is composed of single ideas and their relationships. Their approach
has become an accepted standard for interface designers worldwide.
In directed storytelling the data is also clustered into an agnity
diagram or map. First, the team lays out all the important ideas generated
from the documenters on a wall (fig. 1). Next, the team works together to
group the ideas into clusters or patterns, naming each cluster. Through this
process, the team denes the most common themes related to the
participants experience. In most cases it is desirable to create a model or
framework that reects and documents the themes, as well as the
relationships between and among these themes. The framework can
become a kind of shorthand for the knowledge of what people commonly
experience about what is being designed. The themes and the model can
inuence a teams choices about content, hierarchy, and form in the design.
fig. 1 Students cluster ideas into groups and name them
example 1: blackboard direc ted story telling

BlackBoard is a web-based application that is designed to manage
college course information such as the syllabus, readings, presentations,
homework, communication, and grade books. In theory, BlackBoard
allows instructors to organize their instruction and their materials all in
one place in a way that makes it easy for students to access and follow.
In this example, a student team was instructed to explore how
people currently used BlackBoard in order to see if there were
opportunities for improving the application. Their goal was to nd a way
to quickly discover patterns in the use of BlackBoard by both instructors
and students. Each team produced a guide for their leader to use with
the storytellers (figs. 24 ). The leader asked the instructor to tell a
story about the rst time the instructor used BlackBoard. Next, they
asked an instructor to explain how they used the application now that
they are experienced and use it every day. As an instructor walked
through how they use the application day-to-day, they said they thought
the application must be designed so that it is easy for students. In a
session with a student, however, they heard just the oppositethat the
application must be hard for students to use so that it was easy for

fig. 2 and 3 Students direct an instructor (top) and another student (bottom) as
storytellers of their experiences with BlackBoard.
fig. 4 Ideas gathered from the storytelling sessions are arranged in namable groups.
instructors. The storytelling session quickly revealed from a very small
sample that the product was not meeting either the instructors or the
students needs. Neither students nor instructors had bothered to
explain their frustration before because they thought the product had
been designed with someone else in mind.
In a few short hours directed storytelling enabled the project team
to gather data from four sources: two students and two instructors. Some
of the key themes and patterns from the student research sessions were:
Posting and sharing les is important to both instructors and
students. Instructors should be able to easily submit information
to the application.
There is also a need for simple information dissemination and
communication support. People should be notied when
information is time sensitive.
Currently the interface is unappealing and confusing, and there is
an overwhelming number of unnecessary tools to be learned.
Most users are unaware of all of the applications capabilities. The
application should have a simple interface that gives instructors
and students choice and control over their experience (fig. 5 ).
fig. 5 Phi-hong Has model of the BlackBoard experience based on her teams
directed storytelling sessions.

Many other themes emerged, but as a result of the storytelling sessions
teams were able to clearly prioritize the most important aspects of the
experience and make sure that design concepts they developed
addressed those needs.
example 2: gift-giving
In another exercise, I used directed storytelling to help people quickly
understand the impact of an audience-centered approach to design. The
idea was to quickly understand what was diKerent about giving or
receiving gifts, and whether the issues changed if money was no object.
The ideas would then be used to design a website and print materials
that supported the experience of gift-giving. In this case, teams of
storytellers, leaders, and documenters created data in three contexts
a recent gift-giving experience, a gift-receiving experience, and an
imagined scenario in which one had unlimited money for the purpose
of buying a gift. Sessions were held in the U.S. and in Europe.
In this example, the storytelling sessions were limited to twenty
minutes each. Ten teams of three conducted the sessions in Europe; in
the U.S. there were roughly the same number. The participants were
designers, computer programmers, writers, and some executives. In a few
short minutes, the salient features or themes about what was important
in gift-giving quickly surfaced through the exercises. Interestingly, what
was important about gift-giving seemed to have no cultural diKerences.
Some recurring storylines included descriptions of personality,
timeliness, and emotion. The agnity diagram that was built in Europe
was nearly identical to the one that came from the session in the U.S. In
gift-giving, people look for gifts that t the personality of the person
that they are purchasing for. They want the color, material, and style to
t the person. Another important idea is that making the decision is
hard, but once it is done, it provides a good feeling for the giver. Money
only minimally inuenced peoples choices.
With all that information in mind, a team of designers, programmers,
and writers were able to develop a series of concepts for an online gift-
giving store that would be more sensitive to peoples feelings about
gift-giving. While none of the information they learned through the
session was surprising, spending the short amount of time helped them
come to a consensus quickly about what was important.
when to use direc ted story telling
Directed storytelling is useful for helping teams get to the three to ve
most signicant ideas or themes that are central to an experience. It is
a method that can be used quickly to inform and persuade people about
what is important from a users perspective in a communication,
information, or interaction design challenge. It is important to remember
that the sessions and the data generated are only as good as the
research teams guide preparation and the choice of storytellers. The
people that are selected to tell the stories must have had a compelling
experience that relates to what needs to be designed.
Directed storytelling is a method that is useful for time-bounded
experiences such as the last time you borrowed a book from the library
and not very useful for open-ended long-term experiences like what it
was like to grow apart from your twin sister. It is not a replacement for
extensive immersive or human-centered design research in a particular
context, as in Holtzblatt and Beyers contextual inquiry, but the data
culled from directed storytelling sessions is useful in situations where
time or budget is at a premium. The maps and diagrams that are the
result of using directed storytelling can provide fodder for design teams
to make the case for conducting better and more extensive research at a
later point in time. Directed storytelling is good at getting to the heart
of an experience with little time and investment, and for reinforcing or
validating what the designer may already know.

notes
1. Margaret Diane LeCompte and Jean J. Schensul, Designing and Conducting

Ethnographic Research: Ethnographers Toolkit, vol. 1 (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press, 1999), 4.
2. CliKord Geertz, Making Experiences, Authoring Selves, in Victor Turner and
Edward Bruner, eds., The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), 373.
3. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in
Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 50.
4. Ibid., xxvi.
5. Christopher Ireland, The Changing Role of Research, in Brenda Laurel, ed., Design
Research: Methods and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 22.
6. Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design: Dening Customer-Centered
Systems (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998), 20.
chapter 16
Dezyne Klass: Exploring

Image-making through the
Visual Culture of Hip Hop
JOHN JENNINGS
Hip Hop is a culture. It was created by urban African American and

Latino youth who inhabited the deindustrialized neighborhoods of New
York in the 1970s and early 80s. It was a response to the depravity of a
deteriorating urban environment coupled with an anti-establishment
mentality forged from the remnants of the black power moment, the
civil rights era, and the malaise aKorded by negative postVietnam War
sentiment. Hip Hop was the much-needed release of pressure. It was
forged in improvisation, pain, and a hope for better things. It was an
amplied noise that permeated the alleyways and stoops of the Bronx
and the cold sidewalks and tenements of Brooklyn. No one thought that
it would last. Everyone thought that it had no useuntil it became
American culture. Now it is a global phenomenon that boasts billions of
dollars in album sales and millions of devoted fans across the planet. I
have grown up as a fan of the music, the culture, and the powerful images
that are forever embedded in my memory and my conception of self.
However, images are empty shells. We give them their vast power
and then subordinate ourselves to that power. The viewer endows
images with his or her fantasies, fears, and desires. Image-making in the
corporate-driven music industry has marginalized the breadth of diversity
in Hip Hop representations. It has imprisoned the images into a
241
ritualistically stereotypical, hegemonic view of Hip Hop culture and
made it into another template for mainstream escapism into the realm
of otherness. Today, mainstream Hip Hop echoes the most negative
aspects of modern American culture, depicting hyper-masculine and
patriarchal attitudes, embracing the idea of the commodity-self via the
accumulation of extravagant possessions, and objectifying and degrading
women in the most misogynistic exhibitions possible. Unfortunately,
these media images employ the reication of these aspects through the
stereotypical representation of African Americans. This representation
supports the impression that Hip Hop is an exclusively African American
culture. This could not be further from the truth.
These images cater to what seems to sell. Designers and art
directors in the business of advertising and marketing have used Hip
Hop culture to sell products for multi-million dollar corporations like
McDonalds, Pepsi, and Old Navy. The images that have been
predominantly utilized are merely caricatures of what could be possible
if Hip Hop were seen as a culture and not just another youth trend to be
mined for ideas and oating signiers to be applied to any company that
wants to be considered hip, cool, street, or urban. This sampling
of Hip Hop culture has totally changed its original concept. In its
original, pure form, Hip Hop was a means of empowerment, expression,
and celebration. It was an example of form follows function, for it
became a haven for the denizens of the inner cities to cope with
overwhelming issues they faced on a daily basis. It was designed to be
exible, ever-evolving, and bold, like the culture it was spawned from:
America. The music and culture was about representing a moment in
time and sharing that moment with the community. Hip Hop was about
taking nothing and making something. Its creators used what was
present in their postmodern and seemingly dystopian environment and
created a phenomenon, one that thrives and resonates with fans around
the world. Paradoxically, if corporations had not become involved with
Hip Hop, it would not have become the global juggernaut it is today, and
its power would have remained localized.
My interest and respect for the Hip Hop culture and my equal
attitude in the research of the creation and analysis of images have led
me to develop a course that explores an alternative experimental pedagogy
to teaching image-making and visual literacy. The course is an empirical
exploration in visual sociology as much as a praxis-based art and
design class. It mixes the culture of Hip Hop with traditional design
topics and practices generally taught in graphic design courses
concerning images.
The original spark for my research in this area began with making
comparisons between the Hip Hop culture and graphic design and
examining aspects of both that seemed to be parallel. Both are mediums
of exchange of information and communication. Both focus on
representation of ideas and the forming of connections between people
and community. Both are also denite subcultures, each operating with its
own agreed practices, standards, style, and language. They both have
social ordering systems, ideologies dealing with the construction of self-
expression, and concerns with the expression of self through bricolage
and fashion. Ironically, even though they are subcultures, Hip Hop and
design have both been overtly commodied into corporate versions and
have helped with the branding of American culture on a global scale.
This is one of the reasons that American culture has lost its uniqueness
to the capitalist drive to make prot. The corporate image machine has
streamlined our culture into a neat package with a slick brand attached
to it. This brand is repeated in every form of mass media ad nauseam.
Our culture has been traded for market shares and ease of reproduction
in other countries around the world. This dilution of culture through the
proliferation of the corporate image has prompted many to question
what it means to be an American if every place in the world has the same
signs, customs, and language. What makes us special?
The design culture and profession rose from the Industrial
Revolution, a time when society was shifting from an agrarian-centered
economy to one focused on industry and the expediency of mass-
produced goods. The profession that would become design had its
origins in the craft of middle-class artisans who practiced printmaking,
engraving, and typesetting. However, design has forgotten its humble
blue-collar beginnings and stares down its nose from towering edices
built on the recycling of culture. This recycling of images and visual
idioms has resulted in a sterile and impersonal view of designs potential.
In some cases the product has overshadowed the process. Only the
style of the status quo persists. Corporate design now caters to statistics
and target audiences, not real people.
JENNINGS: DEZYNE KLASS 243

Hip Hop has suKered the same fate. Many consumers who just hear
the music and absorb the images from one of the music channels in
Viacoms impressive collection are unaware of its intriguing origins. The
portrayal of Hip Hop that is dominant in the mass media is only a minute
view of the entire meaning of the culture. The proliferating negative
images stem from the mainstream popularity of the gangsta rap
aesthetic. Mainstream Hip Hop is now a virulent strain of the original
culture depicted through a commodied image-centered expression that
covets power, violence, and sex. The culture has been misused and
maligned by the myopia of prot-focused corporate entities and is
presented in an unbalanced and negative manner. The general public
does not see the original intent of the culture nor its inherent potential.
These aspects, it would seem, are not protable enough.
Hip Hop and design are both very competitive, but for diKerent
reasons. Design has been made competitive by its juxtaposition with
advertising and marketing. It has been transformed into a tool for the
expansion of corporate empires and the selling of vast amounts of
surplus inventory. Hip Hop is innately competitive because it was
originally a means to establish a social hierarchy in inner-city communities.
Urban youths take part in competitions called battles, or style wars,
comprised of b-boying (breaking), gragti writing, MCing, and DJing, to
create a pecking order according to agreed standards of mastery of
these four elements of Hip Hop. Style also is a common concern of both
Hip Hop and design. This elusive element denotes what is socially
accepted as cool, cutting edge, or in. This ephemeral component of
fringe culture is as transient as human existence itself. Both cultures
mold themselves to the ebb and ow of American popular culture;
neither create anything that is truly original. They both combine clichd
metaphors and tropes through existing digital or analog technology into
appropriate expressions and communications that aKect a diverse and
global audience. Design has to take culture into consideration, because
culture informs the individual and the individual viewer makes meaning.
In their defense, it would be virtually impossible for Hip Hop or design to
create a truly original expression in the hyper-postmodern culture in
which we exist. In addition to this, humans need the derivative imagery,
sound samples, and references, because meaning emanates from learned
symbols and the familiarstarting points that may lead to other truths
and experiences. That said, both cultures strive to combine what already
exists in a creative expression. They both focus on the development of a
distinctive voice or problem-solving methodology that is unique to the
individual. The focus is not on being new, but on nding you in the
otsam and jetsam of a repetitive and ever self-referential society.
After observing these similarities, I began to focus on how Hip
Hops particular methods of expression and acquisition could be applied
to traditional image-making in visual communication imparted through
design instruction. The result was a course called Image-making
through the Visual Culture of Hip Hop (aka Dezyne Klass), which strives
to reacquire images through decoding their origin and meaning. It also
examines Hip Hop metaphors through critique and visual experimentation,
which are aKorded via the exercises and image-making problems
assigned. The projects deal with a diverse array of topics that include the
transience of space, identity, and meaning, creating visual narratives,
designing anthropomorphic symbols, and social awareness through
visual essay. The course expounds upon the power of the image in Hip
Hop and how it has helped to promote Hip Hops current status as a
global culture. Visual literacy and social commentary on image is a focus
of the course through the application of traditional modes of analysis.
The course acts as a medium through which the culture and history of
Hip Hop and the culture and processes of image-making can be brought
together to study how they inform each other.
The entire course is broken up into seven projects that serve as
chapters in an overarching narrative. The projects take the students
through a guided tour from the beginning of Hip Hop culture to its
eventual incorporation into the mainstream. With each assignment the
identity of the student is altered to address the concerns outlined in the
project parameters. For instance, during one assignment, a student may
be asked to take on the identity of a notorious gragti artist (or tagger),
while in another, the same student is asked to use artistic acumen in the
guise of a social activist. It is my intention to employ methods dealing
with role-playing, experimentation, and alternative personal-narrative
structures, as well as to control the structure to ensure the ltering of
the information so that the class understands the outcomes.
In addition to the visual aspects of the course, there are a series of
readings, documentaries, audio interpretation exercises, and in-class

presentations and discussions that inform the class about the nature of
Hip Hop and its history. These additional materials support the class and
delve into the implications of how culture aKects image and vice versa.
Presentations on visual literacy are also used to enhance understanding
of images and their inherent power in our image-based culture.
evaluation through critique

Critique is a necessary and valuable tool in the instruction of art and
design. Dezyne Klass is no diKerent in this fashion. It has two critiques
per project. The mid-point critique occurs in the middle of the time
allotted to complete the assignment. It is a more traditional format of
critique, which involves the students presenting their progress at that
point. They also restate the rationale for their solution to the design
problem at hand and why they feel it to be viable. The instructor and the
class oKer constructive criticism to strengthen the images, and the
students take note of this information and attempt to synthesize it into
the nal project by the deadline.
The nal critique has a diKerent format that reinforces certain
aspects of the course. This format is called a tag sampling critique.
Each student selects at random another classmates tag from a
container. The student then speaks about the image created by the
classmate whose name they chose while role-playing as that classmate.
The person who actually did the image responds as a commentator not
in defense of the work, but as an observer. This method of critique
causes all of the students to recontextualize how others view them and
how they view themselves. It also oKers the designers of the images
respite from the rigors of personally defending their work, and gives
them an outsiders point of view that allows them to be more pragmatic
about the eKectiveness of their visual communication. The reexive
ideology of actually sampling a personality, an act, and the result of
anothers solution to a visual problem involves the student as participator
in the generation of meaning. The designer becomes the viewer and the
viewer always makes the meaning.
projec t 1: tag yourself

The rst project of the course deals with self-perception and the
transience of identity. Labeling and naming is a social and psychological
exercising of power. In order to understand an object, concept, or group
of individuals, the hegemonic society in which we exist places a name
upon the subject in order to gain control of it: the nomenclature of a
thing denes that thing. However, this practice functions from a very
structuralist standpoint. It makes the assumption that self and
identity are xed and denable quantities. It is a widely held theory
that identity is mutable from one instance to the next. It has been
theorized that the self is only a myth that we tell ourselves in order to
project meaning upon our lives. It is no coincidence that in many
subcultures, the individual takes on a new identity, as can be seen in the
hacker culture, CB radio culture, and of course in Hip Hop. Coincidentally,
these particular subcultures oKer anonymity and a symbolic rebirth
through existing technology. By reacquiring ones identity, power and
control can also be resumed in a very personal manner. The name signies
the person. Identity is transformed into a visual sign that can now be
applied to ones surroundings. A gragti tag, in this sense, is the essence
of the individual who created it. In Hip Hop culture it is considered a
serious oKense to write over another individuals gragti art.
The students in the course are asked to create a new identity for
themselves. This identity is manifested in a symbolic tag which they
may create by either digital or traditional analog means. A tag is an
alter ego or nickname that is manifested as a stylized typographic
element. This typographic symbol is used to claim space by its ornamental
application to surfaces. While in studio or lecture/discussion sessions,
the instructor and the class are only referred to by their chosen tags.
This method encourages expression and interplay between students and
the instructor. The image of the tag that is created is utilized as a visual
element on the remainder of the projects.
projec t 2: bad meaning good

Hip Hop acquires everything, including language. It bends culture and
space to its whim. In his book Connected, author Steven Shaviro calls Hip
Hop a cultural hacking.1 One such interesting mode of hacking is the
way Hip Hop takes a word from mainstream language and creates a
totally diKerent or opposite meaning. This phenomenon originates from
the African American practice of signifyinga manner of speaking that
employed clever phrases and double meanings that deconstructed the

relationship between language and object, widely used by slaves to
disguise meanings in coded messages to avoid reproach or retaliation
from their owners. It was a means of remixing the local language to
empower themselves in an uncertain and hostile environment.
In this project, the students must select a word from the English
language that usually would have a negative denition. After choosing
the word they must then alter its meaning and acquire it for use in a Hip
Hop vernacular. Students only use found type and handwritten type to
express the word, its phonetic spelling, and its denition. They must also
use it in a sentence. They are not allowed to use digital type but may use
analog typographic representations such as stencil, hand-done type, cut-
out type, press-on type, or letterpress. Students are encouraged to use
variety in the expressions of the denition. Craft and the understanding
of the possibilities of various materials are stressed. After the type is
composed, they are then allowed to scan it into a computer and use digital
media if they choose to do so. The students are also allowed at this point
to use found or self-generated images that might augment or illustrate
the meaning of the acquired word. This project confronts the idea of the
transience of meaning and how all culture is created from found or
acquired means. It also reagrms the connection between language and
the narrative of self.
projec t 3: the four elements timeline

The Hip Hop culture is composed of four main elements: DJing, MCing,
b-boying, and writing. DJing is the musical element of the culture. It
utilizes technology to become a nexus through which all historical music
cultures and experience can be unied to a singular expression. This is
achieved by the extension, overlapping, and remixing of music on two
records on adjoining turntables. The DJ provides the underlying structure
of the Hip Hop culture. MCing is the vocal element of the culture. The
MC (for Master of Ceremonies) speaks rhymes over the underlying
structure that the DJ creates. The narrative is then a hybrid of the
rhythmic experience of the beats provided by the music and the vocal
interplay of the MC. The culture also has a physical manifestation, in
b-boying, or break dancing. It is typically amboyant, acrobatic, and
extremely powerful in its movements. The nal element is the visual
element of writing, or gragti art. The other three elements interplay is
manifested by gragti. It reacquires personal and public spaces by
decorative agrmation. All four of the elements are rooted in the oral
tradition and are ways to exhibit empowerment through mastery. In the
beginning days of Hip Hop culture, battles, or challenges of skill in
the four elements, were focused upon. This was a manner of self-
agrmation and an establishment of hierarchy in a social context. In a
sense, the four elements represent the grammar of the language that
Hip Hop represents. Because of its connection to identity and space, Hip
Hop behaves very much like an extension of the individuals who belong
to the subculture. This project operates upon this postulation.
After lecture and discussion of Hip Hops beginnings and transitions
in our society, the students are asked to do a series of four musically
inspired mark-making exercises in the classroom. Each of the mark-making
images corresponds to the movements of one of the four elements, and
are created in such a manner that they work together as a set. The
mixed-media marks are to be incorporated into a historical narrative that
depicts the history of Hip Hop according to when the individual student
was rst introduced or exposed to the form. This acts as a tool to gauge
the students knowledge of the culture and how they access and
interpret it. It also makes the students think of the nature of history and
how it is far more exible and relative than they might think. The marks
are incorporated into a collage of four parts. The four mark-making
elements are used as an underlying framework for the timeline. The
collage is meant to be a visual chronological system that provides
personal historical insight into the Hip Hop culture. Found images and
textures are then utilized in the collage. There may be human
representations but no complete facial images. The collage may be done
by hand or composed through digital means. This challenges the students
to nd other methods to show emotion and content. The students also
compose haiku poemsreecting the connection between Asian culture
and American urban cultureto embody their feelings on Hip Hop
culture. This poetic form guides the students toward the ltering of
complex ideas into a simplied textual form.
Hip Hop, as a culture, acquires things from popular culture, other
musical genres, and many other sources. It was created in an environment
where the creation of culture was severely limited and improvisation was
imperative. Students are urged to use this ideology to create the images.

Project outcomes deal with the explanation of a denite historical
narrative through symbolism, as well as with the exibility of meaning
according to juxtaposition and context. It also delves into the concept
that our personal memory changes history. This exercise embraces history
as an oral tradition and uses images to create a multi-modal expression
that includes the image-maker in the communication process. History
expressed and disseminated in strictly textual mode dictates to the
reader and can exclude and isolate them from the events. This exercise is
an experiment to encourage students to think of time as an inclusive
whole and not in fragmented segments of past, present, and future.
projec t 4: self-image projec t

We are constantly aware of how we are perceived by others. It controls
a majority of our choices concerning our personal appearance and self-
image. Again, the course deals with self as a transient social construct,
and this project is a manifestation of this notion. Basically, we strive to
become that which is acceptable to others and therefore sublimate
ourselves to their perceptions and assessments. In this assignment,
students experiment with personal myths and narratives and how
environment and other individuals perceptions of them shape their
understanding of themselves.
Students are paired with partners arbitrarily by pulling names.
Each student is interviewed by their partner with the implementation of
a questionnaire and a series of meetings. The interviewer photographs
the subject, occluding their total face. The manipulation of identity may
be digital or through analog means. This is intended to transform the
icon of the students faces into symbolic representations of their
physical selves. The interviewer is required to use found images and
texture (including the questionnaire itself) in the creation of the project.
These image choices must be based on aspects of their partner in some
descriptive manner. The image is utilized in the context of a faux
wanted poster, and the text on the poster is hand-done by the student
who is depicted. The text lists crimes and scenarios that would actually
be viewed as virtues in our society. This acts as a reversal of the Hip Hop
aesthetic: good means bad. This is a statement on the relativity of
meaning and the arbitrariness of the social constructs of good and evil.
The poster designs allow them to be easily reproduced by either digital
printing or color copying. Each student makes ten copies of the poster
and places them in public spaces that allow them to remain displayed for
an extended period of time. The location of these posters is shared with
the class. Over the course of a month the students take twenty-four
documentary images of the poster in the public spaces. Once the posters
are in place, the instructor arbitrarily divides the class into two groups.
Each group is instructed to covertly tag and write over their classmates
posters over the course of the month. Both groups are led to believe
they are the only ones instructed to do this act. Essentially, the two
groups become tag crews and inadvertently become competitors. This
partially simulates an actual tagging experience and examines the
competitive nature that drives not only Hip Hop culture but also
American culture in general. After the documentation of the sporadic
tagging exercise has occurred, the posters are collected and brought to
the classroom to discuss the results. The commentary centers on the
construct of self and how it relates to public spaces and how the ego
acquires these public spaces and symbolically changes them into
personal spaces. Discussion also probes into the practice of symbolic
representation and how these symbols aKect us on a very personal level.
It is an intriguing experiment that enlightens students to how symbols
like logos can aKect us and how image is used to persuade us to adopt
symbolic references for self-image.
projec t 5: hip hop show poster (remixed)

Semiotics is the branch of linguistics that addresses visual signs as a
language system. It can be extremely useful in the analyzation and
creation of images. Semiotics breaks signs into three diKerent categories:
icons, symbols, and indexical signs. After a lecture on this subject, the
class randomly chooses a Hip Hop act to be the focus of their projects.
When completed, each student will have designed two posters that
focus on a faux venue announcement for the Hip Hop stars they chose.
The posters focus on both iconic and symbolic representationsiconic
signs resemble the objects they represent, while symbolic signs are
learned, and do not resemble the object or concept they represent. One
poster utilizes the likeness of the Hip Hop artist(s) the students chose.
These likenesses are generated in a fashion that ts the students
individual preferences and skill sets. The second poster is a remix of

the iconic poster. Remixing, in Hip Hop music, is the practice of redoing
a previously released song with a new perspective using alternative
production, guest artists, new video versions, and total repackaging.
This concept of remixing is acquired and utilized in a visual sense. The
remixed version of the poster generates symbolic representations of
the content that their chosen Hip Hop artist focuses on. This, of course,
requires extensive research on the artist and analysis of lyrical content
and media images that represent that artist. The student also uses
elements from their previous projects in the remixed version of their
posters. Outcomes of this visual sampling address how images are
acquired and reused for visual communications. They also examine how
understanding the language of signs enhances designers visual
communication and develops their conceptualization skills.
projec t 6: hip hop ad mascot

It would be a mistake to not recognize designs intimate connection to
consumer culture. Advertising rms readily co-opt image-makers and
designers into their sphere in order to generate interest in a seemingly
unending supply of products. One major practice that advertisers use is
the use of false juxtapositions regarding youth culture. Our society is a
youth-centered economy. Therefore, if a corporation can attach itself to
something that appears cool, it can possibly generate a very large
prot. This is no diKerent with Hip Hop culture. The television is literally
ooded with products that try to merge themselves with Hip Hop.
Sprite, for instance, has successfully done this.2 The soft drink currently
has a Hip Hop spokesperson, a doll-like African American simulation
named Thirst. Thirst is a very stereotypical representation of both an
African American man and the culture of Hip Hop.
In the classroom, the students imagine themselves as a famous
artist/designer and that they have been approached by a major
corporation to design a new ad campaign attempting to use Hip Hop
style to appeal to a young consumer audience. Students are assigned
various products that are currently being sold in the marketplace. These
products are very generic youth-centered items that usually would not
use Hip Hop culture in an ad campaign. The assignment entails creating
an anthropomorphic mascot or symbol that represents their assigned
product. The students provide a full-color implementation of their
character in a magazine ad. The result of the project is a parody of the
false juxtaposition process in advertising, exposing the misappropriation
of culture in corporate design that openly mocks subcultures for prot.
The focus of this project examines the constant acquisition of
mainstream culture and stimulates discussion about the co-opting of
culture to sell products. Perceived diKerences are used as social
constructs to market the other to a particular customer. Juxtaposing a
product with a gure that represents otherness is a powerful and
eKective practice. The other ceases to have an identity, but becomes
part of the acquired self-image of the mainstream observer. Hip Hop,
like any other subculture, acquires objects from the mainstream through
bricolage and retasks them with diKerent connotations particular to
subculture members. To confront and use this process, mainstream
commodity culture tries to align itself with this coolness and destroy it
through overexposure. It squeezes the cool out of subjects. This is a
prime example of how both design and Hip Hop cultures are commodied.
Just enough of Hip Hop style is gleaned in order to create a simulation of
a pure Hip Hop cultural expression. This project addresses the morality
and validity of this practice.
projec t 7: graffiti griots

Hip Hop, like design, has no conscience besides the one that is breathed
into it by the individual. Groups like X-Clan, Public Enemy, the Coup, and
Dead Prez have used Hip Hop to address sociopolitical concerns.
Likewise, one can observe the social conscience in the work of designers
like Tibor Kalman, Edward Fella, and Barbara Krueger. Both Hip Hop and
design have rich histories in opening up dialogues that deal with social
issues in a powerful and thought-provoking manner. Bearing this in
mind, students are asked to select a series of ve thematically related
images that they feel depict negative or harmful images in the context of
a particular social issue. These images are screenshots, magazine ads,
illustrationsanything that they are interested in dealing with. By
collecting these images, the students are creating a narrative. Using
their found images, they must create a counter-narrative. The images
may be cut up and rearranged, digitally altered, and so forth. The
students should formulate symbols and images that relate to their
perspective on the subject their images represent. They are also asked to

select found imagery from their immediate surroundings (such as their
bedroom, kitchen, or den) that should be added in juxtaposition to the
found imagery. These visual essays should be designed as a related series
and should also express the students personal concerns with their
chosen aspect of social discourse. Text may be found quotations or self-
authored thoughts. The class must think of cohesive visual statements
that are compiled over the original images.
The students are encouraged to use image to combat image. They
are instructed to battle the myriad images attempting to tag their
subconscious with unsolicited messages. This nal assignment operates
on the notion that all advertising, propaganda, and media is, in a manner,
tagging us with information on a daily basis. It also deals with the fact
that personal space is a construct that can be external and internal. The
students use of symbols from their personal space to tag the ads and
images is a metaphor for reacquiring their personal space from the
constant bombardment of negative or persuasive imagery. It also deals
with the ideas of what space is as a simulation or construct.
conclusion
Dezyne Klass is an empirical study of the nature of the subcultures of Hip
Hop- and design-oriented image-making. It is also a visual sociological
inquiry into the nature of images and how they aKect the individual,
space, and popular culture. The course acts as a catalyst for discussing
the manner in which mainstream culture generates subcultures such as
Hip Hop and design and then reacquires them to further its hegemonic
status. The class challenges popular perceptions of the potential of
images and how they are used in society, and is designed to be a tool to
examine the necessity of cultural studies and research to graphic design
pedagogy and practice. The class explores the role of the designer/
image-maker as a sort of visual DJ. In a sense, designers, like DJs, sample
previously generated information and reformat it into appropriate forms
to move the crowd. Through approaching the remixing of images by
understanding culture and how it aKects society, we can possibly
reappropriate designs power in the dissemination of information and go
beyond the mere mimicry of a style. Part of the charge of being a visual
communicator, in my opinion, is to be responsible for the images we
construct and how they aKect the population. We should fully examine
diverse subcultures and make a serious eKort to understand them before
we take visual manifestations of those cultures and attach them to
products for clients. The myriad subcultures that exist in the world have
particular meanings and identications for their participants. Perhaps
understanding this will assist in achieving enlightenment in these
matters and help to examine the design profession as a whole in order
to take account of what we are actually saying with images. Design, like
Hip Hop, was meant to bring individuals, ideas, form, and information
into a unied and harmonious composition. However, today design nds
itself intertwined with global corporate interests that sometimes
segregate people more than bring them together. A very popular Hip
Hop expression states It aint where youre from, its where youre at. It
is worthwhile to apply such reection to the profession of design: where
are we now, and where are we going?
notes
1. Steven Shaviro, Connected (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 46.

2. The process by which this was achieved was thoroughly explored by Douglas
RushkoKs Frontline report The Merchants of Cool, PBS, rst aired February 27, 2001.

chapter 17
A Step Ahead of Praxis: The Role

of Design Problem Denition in
Cultural Ownership of Design
PETER MARTIN
As an American, living and teaching design in Qatar has inspired my

interest in how design problems are dened. For six years I have
witnessed this small Arabic nation experience change in nearly every
aspect of its built environment and marketplace, as well as in its social
and political spheres. In a simplied view, Qatar is using its tremendous
wealth from oil and natural gas to purchase buildings, events, and
institutions from abroad and bring them home to take out of the box,
setting them down on a rocky desert peninsula extending oK the east
side of Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. These acquisitions are led by
an overwhelming attention to the physical product, nominal signicance,
and their ownership, while little is done to utilize or even develop
comprehensive strategies needed for the decisions of what to acquire,
nor how to implement them. Because of a lack of consideration for
processes, systems, and situational dynamics, the imported facility and
operational managers required to operate and maintain these newly
acquired complex structures, systems, and organizations are rarely
granted the executive power needed to direct critical actions and
resources necessary for their sustainable operation. The results are new
buildings, new education programs, and new systems that are underused,
stagnant, or quickly abandoned for an even newer acquisition.
256
The intention behind this development is commendable, as Qataris
in general are very ambitious in improving the standards and qualities of
life for their fellow citizens. It is remarkable to consider the praxis of this
situation; so much of Qatars initiative is being realized at an extraordinary
rate. I can attest from my own experience that when I arrived in Qatar in
September 1999, the main city of Doha was a diKerent place. There was
one shopping mall. Only a handful of buildings exceeded ten oors.
Qatari women were not allowed to drive. There were but two universities.
There was no constitution establishing specic rights for each Qatari.
Less than six years later, I nd myself in a country of about 800,000
people, where each person has over half a square meter of retail space.
There are about fty buildings that are higher than ten oors, and many
more on the rise. Women are driving. There are now six universities with
more planned. And there is a constitution that both Qatari men and
women voted to ratify. While these changes have been occurring, Qatar
has kept itself on schedule in preparing to host the 2006 Asian Games,
the second largest athletic event in the world only behind the Summer
Olympics. This small country is proof that nearly any idea can be realized
if a society directs its resources and choices accordingly.
What I nd most fascinating about this amazing little country is how
these ideas for change form. There seems to be a habit of looking abroad,
mainly to Europe and North America, to see what can be added to
Qatar. Examples of this include concepts and practices of luxury, cultural
development, as well as new data resources. In a culture in which the
Western practices of adhering to precise timetables is not a native
custom, for instance, one can visit the City Center Doha shopping mall
and choose from more than ten shops selling Rolexes. Similarly, a new
wireless high-speed internet access service called Hotspot allows mobile
phones and other digital data management tools to connect to the data
resources of the internet. Because Qatar hosts a relationship-based
culture, however, Qataris do not utilize mediated data/information
nearly as much as conversational interaction. Without this established
convention, there is little locally specic content available for the users
to access. Hotspot seems nothing more than the latest technological
capabilities being implemented in Qatar as they are in the West. Elsewhere
in Doha, a museum for Islamic arts is being constructed, designed by the
Chinese architect I. M. Pei and staKed by curators largely imported from
257
Europe. Despite its near-completion, there are no signs of Qatar having
begun to develop its own resources for the cultural and educational
programming this museum will require; instead, this cultural development
seems limited to the nineteenth-century European concept of a museum
being merely a building to store unique and precious objects.
The question of how these ideas of change arise is signicant
because the current course, scope, and speed of change in Qatar raises
many issues for the health of its culture and society. Among all these
changes, we can see a widening generation gap, a dramatic increase in
preventable medical conditions such as diabetes and obesity, the highest
automobile accident fatality rate in the world, an increase in solid waste
and air pollution, and a radical rise of materialistic consumerism. But the
most signicant observation that I have made in Qatar is what I see as a
weakening or deterioration of its culture. Most traditional architecture
has been destroyed, Western dress adorns teenagers and young adults,
cell phones and the internet facilitate social relationships outside the
social norms, and there is a showcasing of things traditional which only
reveals the degree of separation that has occurred between todays
lifestyles and the traditional life of fewer than fty years ago.
The development of Qatar is at a critical point where it must keep
itself one step ahead of the praxis it is now capable of. I am not advocating
a preservation of Qatarthe question of whether this society should
change or not was answered many decades ago soon after the discovery
of oil. The more relevant question is: How can Qatar design its change so
that it still continues being Qatar? If this question is not addressed, it is
probable that the country will soon nd itself living within a strange
tangle of cultural fragments that fails to support communities, families,
and individuals in their eKorts to live together (fig. 1 ).
Because of its small scale, rapid and recent change from a traditional
to a modern society, and its budding design industry, Qatar is a potent
example of what is happening to some extent all over the world as part
of globalization. Design, because of its growing participation in global
markets and networks, is becoming less relevant to culture. As a result of
more powerful technology and systems, design has become an agent of
change that does not simply modify the way our world appears; it can
now transform the way the world is, the way we view the world, and the
way we interact within the world. Today, cultures are becoming more
fig. 1 A signboard in Qatar provides a cultural mash of McDonalds promoting
Chinese-style food in Arabic.
vulnerable to arbitrary and unsustainable changes than ever before.

There is a critical relationship between a culture and the design it
employs. This is clearly demonstrated in Qatar, where there is a tension
between cultural traditions and conventions and the performances of
implemented design products, services, and systems. The evolution and
sustainability of a culture can be enabled or hindered by design praxis,
and to contribute to the health of a culture while avoiding its deterioration,
a society must practice a more careful denition of its own change prior
to its praxis. From this synergy of culture and design, education and
research in the area of design problem denition (the step ahead of
praxis) become increasingly critical to societies as they navigate change
within a global world in a way that allows each culture to have ownership
of its design.
culture: what is it ?
Culture is a system so complete and detailed that it serves as a
sustaining medium for our everyday lives just as water does for sh. It is
essential, ubiquitous, constant, and invisible. Because of the nature of
culture, we are accustomed to looking through this medium with the
faithful assumption that it is there just as it should be. Without hesitation
we trust our cultures to fully support our gestures and expressions of
individual and social identities. Without consciousness we rely on our
MARTIN: A STEP AHEAD OF PRAXIS 259

cultures as the basis for our senses of place and of value. Without eKort
we utilize the stable venues culture provides for our community
discourses and decision-making.
Because of the seamless and transparent nature of culture it is a
digcult thing to observe directly, understand comprehensively, and
dene usefully. It is so elusive that we commonly regard everyday life as
something incidental, while regarding culture as some form existing
only in rened deliberations such as traditional celebrations, exceptional
artistic expression, and historical costumes. We typically begin to think
about culture only when we encounter diKerent foods, clothing, or
customs. But these easily perceptible conditions are only vestiges of
complex identities, technologies, and narratives that have evolved to
answer some basic questions of how a group of people should
understand and live their everyday lives together within a given place.
culture: why is it so important ?

Culture is a method for individuals to live together within a particular
place. There are three primary dependencies of human life that are
acknowledged in this statement. The rst is in the idea of being an
individual. We as individuals depend on a worldview to outline who we
are in what place. This view explains some very basic questions: What is
my life? What is the world? And how do the two interact? A healthy
culture provides a signicant part of this worldview with forms such as
religion, gender roles, and explanatory narratives.
The second dependency of human life is in our living together. To
fulll our basic needs, not to mention our procreation, requires
collaborative eKorts of more than one individual. This requirement extends
far beyond satisfying the physical circumstances needed for each individual
life. Being together provides each of us with profound psychological and
spiritual benets, which are easily revealed if a person is deprived of
these in an isolated situation. Culture is the most powerful tool we possess
to coordinate a productive and meaningful cohabitation.
The third dependency of human life that is accommodated by a
healthy culture is grounded in the fact that despite the amazing
accomplishments of civilization we are still biological creatures that are
part of natural ecologies. The current environmental crisis that manifests
itself with conditions such as global warming, environmental toxicity,
species and habitat destruction, and overpopulation is merely
symptomatic of a cultural crisis that has permitted humans to pursue
meanings, activities, and purposes that create imbalanced natural
resource requirements and waste production. If we examine traditional
cultures, we nd mechanisms that have evolved to do such things as
control population, sustain food supplies, and utilize local materials to
provide adequate protection against severe climate conditions. A
healthy culture is a particular conguration of signicances, values, and
practices that connect a social group of people to a particular place in a
way where all needs can be met sustainably by the local natural resources.
culture: what does design have to do with it ?

Design is the process of intention-guided specication and implementation
of changes in form, structure, and/or signicance of material, sign,
event, or interaction within a given context. This tremendous scope
makes design one of the most pervasive mediums with which a culture is
engaged. Design and culture are mutually generative of each other.
Culture feeds the design process used to establish creative outcomes
that in turn facilitate performances of use and meaning that shape the
cultural context. In its essence, this is an ideal self-sustaining cycle:
design is a democratic practice that depends on local participation in all
aspects of the cycle, and it is acutely responsive to a wider range of
design performance requirements demanded by the unique situations
occurring within the cultural context (fig. 2 ).
culture, change, and design

As organizational learning advisor Arthur Battram states, complexity
theory has demonstrated that when a complex system reaches a point of
equilibrium, it stops, or dies.1 Also, complexity analysis shows that if
variables become too great, the naturally evolved patterns of change within
a system will break down and chaotic behavior will override all. It appears
that any system requires continuous and balanced change to sustain itself.
Culture is a dynamic system comprised of a great number of variable
values, signicances, and pragmatic concerns that are continually
interacting within an endless network of actions and reactions. In other
words, culture is not a static set of rules but a live organism that has to
change to avoid settling into an equilibrium that will conne individual

fig. 2 An ideal cycle that is sustained by a contextual relationship between culture
and design.
spirits, practice traditions blindly, or overconsume its local resources.

We can think of change occurring in a culture as a form of continual
adaptation to its own new condition. For this change to remain continuous
and balanced, however, it must never be too radical, rapid, or arbitrary.
Change of this nature can create an arrangement of meanings, values,
and purposes that do not follow any pattern that can be discerned,
leaving a cultures members with a fragmented worldview, strained
connections, and an unguided relationship with their natural habitat.
Such conditions make a culture extremely vulnerable to collapse or
radical transformation that essentially destroys the original culture.
The reason for design is change. Design is choosing and planning a
realization, to act in a manner that preserves, amplies, transforms,
removes, or replaces a preexisting state. It is one of cultures most
powerful tools to direct or support change, especially when considering
the power and extent of modern technology and networks. Thus, if a
culture must change, and design is one of the most powerful tools for
change, it is clear that design is in a signicant position to inuence the
direction of that change. Good design will reinforce sustainable change
within its cultural context (fig. 3 ).
fig. 3 The sustainable cultural change supported by a contextual relationship between
design and culture.
a problem
The cultural problem considered here deals with many of the
circumstances of a globalizing world. The evolution of our modern era
has transformed aspects of traditional cultures into dimensions that
demand more abstract, isolated, invisible, and standardized forms. The
resulting scale, scope, structure, and speed of some of the variable
conditions within modern life present a challenge to the stability of any
culture (fig. 4 ). The signicant impact on social living that the modern
era presents is that an increasing number of designs are based upon
opportunity, as opposed to a more direct fulllment of what we need.
fig. 4 Various characteristics found within traditional and modern social living.

Perhaps one of the most perplexing conditions of modern living is that
because of our ability to actualize so many opportunities it is digcult to
understand what we truly need.
The role of culture in human societies is to provide a system of
interlacing all the variable conditions of a people and a place in a way
that supports harmonious living where all needs are met. The problem
that seems to be arising within modernizing/globalizing places like
Qatar is that choices and realizations enabled by design often distort
peoples perceptions of what they need. Powerful technology and
pervasive networks begin to lift society oK its land into a conceptual
bubble of fragmented information, virtual places, commodied identities,
and arbitrary purposes. What is occurring in Qatar and in many other
countries throughout the world is the emergence of non-places that
become social pockets into which ow designed products, identities, and
performances from foreign factories. This condition perpetuates a
distraction from the local traditional culture and becomes a situation
where the local design cannot compete with the images and ideas from
abroad. The dynamics of global media, markets, isolated innovation, and
professional services render the ideal cycle in which culture shapes its
own design vulnerable to destructive interruption (fig. 5 ).
In globalization, imported products and methods can undermine a
cultures ability to fulll the needs of its individuals and communities.
fig. 5 The importing of design from another context interrupts the ideal cycle of the
contextual relationship between culture and design.
fig. 6 The interaction of signicances, values, and pragmatics determines the needs
within any situation. As change is applied to this arrangement the needs will change
accordingly.
Without consideration for a users culture, design is more likely to

prevent sustainable and meaningful answers to some of the basic
questions culture naturally answers (fig. 6 ).
The essence of this cultural problem within a globalizing world is
that change enabled by design is being led mostly by economic motives
that hold little regard for what societies and individuals in various
cultural contexts need. It is as if we have been distracted by the marvel
of the opportunities of convenience, manipulation, and wealth that can
be actualized. We have failed to keep one step ahead of praxis, and as a
result we are letting our cultures lose ownership of their design.
an approach to this problem

This problem presents the paradox of a universal problem demanding
many unique contextual and situational responses. A simple, proper
solution is therefore nearly impossible to come by. However, the
development of design problem denition education and research
initiatives can provide a basis for relevant perspectives and productive
methodologies for the many individual responses this problem requires.
Design problem denition is the identication of critical goals and
objectives of performance or impact to be used to guide the direction of
research, evolution, and evaluation of ideas throughout the design process.

In essence, it is the process of determining what is needed so that a
designed realization can somehow provide support to fulll this need.
This process of dening a design problem should consider the
contextual design performance more than the product. It should develop
a strategy of product introduction, use, and disuse that will lead to a
particular condition within a context (fig. 7 ).
The nature of this process of dening a design problem is to draw
upon the context for direction in determining a performance that will
enhance that context. This follows precisely the ideal cycle of design,
where a culture is understood well enough to develop contributions that
will change that culture in a sustainable way. By developing and exercising
design problem denition capabilities, designers and decision-makers
can participate in a culture with thoughtful, sensitive, and responsive
design processes that bring forth products to enable the praxis of
change that sustains a healthy culture. This ability to dene design
problems can become the basis of a design tradition that understands its
cultural context well enough to accurately identify and eKectively fulll
what is truly needed.
the role of design problem definition education

and research in a cultures ownership of design
This approach sounds simple, almost obvious. However, given what
is happening in Qatar and many other parts of the world, it is not
obvious enough.
fig. 7 The interaction between a product and a context creates a particular

performance that is targeted by the design problem denition.
In Qatar there are the obvious examples of imported, highly
designed institutions that are culturally destructive, such as American
fast food franchises. The fact that these food outlets are very popular
among Qataris demonstrates that the purchasing of this food, which pulls
individuals away from eating meals within traditional family groupsnot
to mention that the food itself has little relation to the history or
geography of Qataris a form of imported design being embraced with
little awareness or concern for its destructive cultural impact.
A less obvious example of Qatar importing something without
carefully adapting it to t its cultural context is the university where I
teach. We can only praise Qatars investment to develop its rst design
education program. Their commitment to high quality is apparent in
their seeking an American university degree program. However, the
establishment of this design college in Doha was approached with the
buy-an-American-university-degree-program-bring-it-home-take-it-out-
of-the-box-and-plug-it-in mentality. The main objective was to have
on-site an American design curriculum taught by instructors from this
American university. The result is the teaching of an American design
program based upon Bauhaus and postmodern philosophies within an
Arabic-Islamic culture. This approach produced, among other repercussions,
conditions such as a graphic design program without a specic curricular
initiative dedicated to Arabic calligraphy and typography.
Yet there are even more subtle cultural impacts to having such a
thoroughly American education program in Qatar. One such impact
centers on the idea of individualism. American instructors were quite
literally dropped into this rocky desert context with an American
curriculum and an inherent disposition to approach learning objectives,
methods, and evaluation from an individualistic basis. As a result, many
of the students are developing a more individualistic perspective of
design and even themselves. This inevitably will create changes in how
these students engage design, understand their own context, and even
their identities in a way quite diKerent from their traditional, more
collective Arabic approach.
I am not, and cannot, use this example to direct criticism at what
Qatar and this university have done, because the fact remains that
young and productive Qatari designers educated in Qatar are now
entering a budding design industry in their own country that did not

exist ten years earlier. Rather, I use this example to show that in todays
global context, things as signicant and complex as a university program
are being carelessly imported from one culture into another with the
expectation on nearly everyones part that it is simply adding a good thing
to an existing cultural context, when in fact it brings with it signicant
performances capable of creating a negative cultural impact. This example
demonstrates the necessity to dene what a society and its cultural
context needs before acting on realizing any changes. In this instance, a
pursuit of design problem denition could have been a point of departure
for Qatar to establish its own design education. With a design problem
denition, aspects of Qatars society and culture could have been
considered as to which ones must be preserved and which ones developed.
There are encouraging developments in design practices around
the world that signal a paradigm shift for design as a transition from a
form-giving service to a strategy development collaboration. These
developments include incorporating the questions, insights, and skills
founded in other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and
political science. Ethnography is also becoming a more commonly used
tool to understand existing contexts and potential performances.
However, these eKorts are almost exclusively applied to design projects
that have been initiated to benet specic companies. Most of the
ethnography is focused on potential individual consumers. Although
these are valuable initiatives that generate better understanding of
context and more relevant ideas of performance, their outcome mostly
feeds into a global consumer market and ignores the issue of a products
cultural impact.
These market-driven eKorts need not be diverted into socially
engineered programs, but the development of education and research
for design problem denition can nevertheless be utilized as a basis
for developing the capabilities and scope of what has started as primarily
a corporate innovation. This development can lead market-performing
initiatives to contribute to the social contexts in a way that provides
sustainable cultural changes that address the needs of its members. If
designers develop greater awareness, deeper understanding, and more
eKective skills and methods in design problem denition, they will be
able to contribute, even lead, initiatives not based on generating
opportunity but directed at identifying and fullling the needs of a given
culture. The development of a societys ability to dene its own design
problems will empower its members to participate with greater
understanding and accept full responsibility for the performances that
are realized within their cultural context.
For a society to develop these abilities of design problem denition,
it must invest in a design education to establish the basic skills for its
new designers to identify a cultural context and develop performances
that can contribute appropriately to this context. Also needed for this
development is the investment in research that generates cultural
insight as well as pioneering methodologies in observation and analysis
appropriate to the dynamic and complex subjects of modern living.
Design education is a powerful way to inuence designers
capabilities and their role in a society. In developing a young designers
ability to dene design problems, he or she must gain an awareness and
understanding of culture in general, as well as his or her own specic
culture. Unfortunately, many design education programs do not fully
embrace a curricular integration of other disciplines that have great
cultural relevance, such as anthropology. The perspective of the
interdependency of culture and design is commonly held and even
assumed in much discussion of design. Implicit within that is the further
assumption that designers have a developed understanding of what
culture is. Unfortunately, often they do not. As a result of this
underdeveloped understanding of culture applied in design, products
often only manifest cultural expressions that are not relevant enough to
sustain the function of a culture within everyday life. Culture can be
elusive and digcult to perceive. Young designers require guidance and
support to be made aware of culture and to observe it well enough to
generate an accurate understanding that can be applied within their
designs. A curricular initiative to develop design students appreciation
of culture should include some basic ethnographic skills that will enable
them to begin their professional careers with the ability to research,
analyze, and dene a projects context.
Unfortunately, there often is a preoccupation with product form
and style in design school studios. A design education must also develop
ones understanding of design performance. This area of interaction
between a product and its context is frequently overlooked in design
education programs. Understanding that the value of any designed

product rests within its use and inuence is critical to appreciating
performance. Curricular initiatives that explore the nature and scope of
design performance are a vital component to a design educations
success in developing a students design problem denition skills.
With awareness and skills necessary to understand cultural context
and design performance, a young designer will be able to participate in
design initiatives that contribute positive changes within a culture.
However, because of the complexity, broad scope, and change involved
in eKective design solutions, we can never expect developments in
design education programs alone to fully develop a societys ability to
practice a design tradition based upon design problem denition.
Continual general and specic research into culture is also needed.
Research in design problem denition does not at this point have a
developed foundation and oKers a limited range of examples that have
been documented. However, with more projects now being developed
using a basis of diverse research and observation methods, a foundation
is beginning to form. Yet because of the commercial context of this
research, much of it has become limited in its application. Because of its
focus on supporting the design of consumer products, this research
often concerns individual situations as opposed to a cultural context.
Attention to developing design problem denition research agendas
would help a society ll this need. These agendas should be developed in
scope to include social, cultural, political, economic, spiritual, biological,
psychological, and philosophical inquiries. Such agendas would aid
individual design initiatives to develop specic research questions
concerning context and performance that would support a greater cultural
benet as well as t the needs of the project at hand.
To provide an example of such a research agenda, here are ve
questions that can be researched in Qatar to begin inuencing the scope
of any design problem denition research started in this country:
How is Qatar changing?
Why are these changes pursued, and pursued at the speed they are?
How is design taking part in these changes?
Where did the ideas for these changes come from?
How could design play a role in developing these ideas for change?
These ve questions are only one example of what inquiry can be
pursued to better understand the potentials of design problem
denition within the specic context of Qatar. Any such research agenda
and supporting methodologies should be adjusted to t the cultural,
social, and political circumstances within each context.
A societys development of its design problem denition ability
provides a useful approach to the conicts between the modern and
traditional ways of life that can hinder a given cultures path toward its
own appropriately unique actualization. This ability to dene its own
design problems is critical for a culture to maintain ownership over its
design traditions. Otherwise, the design praxis that emerges within a
culture of todays modern and global world may well be unable to
support the ideal cycle of a culture leading design that in turn inuences
that culture; it will be too vulnerable to the invasions and dependency on
foreign ideas that only accidentally may lead to healthful cultural changes.
conclusion
I may have risked providing nothing more than an elaborate tautology by
outlining this theory of how education and research in the area of design
problem denition is becoming critical to helping societies navigate
change within a global world in a way that allows each culture to maintain
ownership of its own design. I take this risk because I believe consideration
of the interrelationship of culture, modern living, and design to be
relevant, even urgent. The modern, global world poses a serious challenge
to culture, a necessary tool for all of us to participate in social living
within a given geographical place. The rising cultural crises around the
world are not only threatening the meaning and happiness of individuals,
families, and communities; they also threaten the global ecological
environment on which life depends. Design in its current model as
commercial enabler cannot be sustained. Something must change.
There is no need for any sort of devolution requiring us to abandon
our technologies and global networks. But design can absorb and
develop greater understanding and abilities in dening paths of change
before it generates products that realize change: to keep a step ahead
of design praxis.
Designers and clients must collaborate in nding what our needs
are and use the capabilities of current technologies and networks to
fulll these needs in ways that do not simply create attractive opportunities
divorced from their cultural context. Designers must gain the ability to

create changes that sustain our cultures harmoniously instead of
corrupting them. To do this I propose that societies in danger of having
their culture subsumed by globalism, such as Qatar, invest in developing
the education and research needed to establish awareness, skills, and
understanding of dening design problems in a way that allows each
culture to hold ownership of its own design.
notes
1. Arthur Battram, Navigating Complexity (London: Industrial Society, 1998).
chapter 18
Mediating Messages:
Cultural Reproduction
through Advertising

SEVAL DLGEROGLU YAVUZ
There are diKering viewpoints about the number of advertisements that

people are exposed to in their daily lives. While a 1990 Economist study
estimates that the average American is exposed to 3,000 commercial
messages in a day from all media, more conservative studies reveal that
this number is anywhere between 150 and 300.1 In either event, this
competition for attention drives actors of the advertising industry to strive
to create messages that cut through the cluttermessages that are visible
and noticeable amidst all the others. The challenge, however, is twofold:
consumers need to notice ads rst, and then must nd them relevant in
order for the ads to inuence them and stimulate a purchasing behavior.
According to a 1992 Gallup poll, American consumers regard
advertising as one of the least ethical occupations. The study revealed
that among twenty-six professions, advertising ranked twenty-fth, just
below insurance salesmen and just above car salesmen.2 The abundance
of new products on the market and advertisements across all media, in
addition to increasing product sales overall, however, do not reect this
skepticism. Rather, it veries that companies do see the benets from
advertising. Success stories on the websites of advertising rms show
the diKerence between before and after cases for the products for which
they produce advertisements. These studies reveal how consumer
273
perception of products improves positively, and how sales soar after the
execution of advertising campaigns, despite consumers insistence that
they do not trust advertisements, ignore them, and are therefore are not
inuenced by them.
In their endeavor to sell their products, corporations seek to create
a positive perception in the public. They try to reach audiences through
advertisements that promote products through messages that are
grounded in the sociocultural background of consumers. Drawing on
such sociocultural elements as social representations, cultural models,
shared knowledges, reality, and stereotypes, ads attempt to illustrate
how products are relevant and necessary (see table 1). Advertisements
not only reect on basic physical needs but also evoke strong desire for
products by creating a sense of necessity. This necessity is usually social-
psychological: ads tell consumers how the possession of the products
in question improves the success of ones individual, emotional, social,
and professional life. The use of sociocultural elements taps into human
perception and conduct in sociocultural environments, turning desires
into needs.
Using these elements is vital to advertising because it is through
them that ads nd a common language to communicate with their
designated target audience. The elements exist and circulate in society
through perceptions, actions, and interactions of individuals and groups.
Advertisings communication with the public through the assemblies of
the sociocultural elements becomes a vehicle that constructs and shapes
reality and knowledge. In other words, advertising actively and socially
constructs what we know and regard as real.
Prescribing consumer values and behavior through representations
of products is a tacit process, because the messages of advertisements
are embedded in culture. Articulations of culture in advertisements
ascribe meanings to products, making them socially and psychologically
appealing tools that help create reality. Humans use these social-
psychological tools with embedded meanings in order to make sense of
reality in their interactions with others and their conduct in sociocultural
environments.
Along the lines of the interaction between culture and advertising,
the question whether advertising creates culture and social values or
simply mirrors them is widely debated.3 Both perspectives, actually, are
table 1: Conceptual terms used in the study
Denition of Terminology
Shared knowledge Shared reality Stereotypes
Common perceptions, A larger system of Socially constructed
assumptions, and beliefs culturally specic standardized patterns
that are shared by the meanings and practices of oversimplied
members of a society. that shape humans opinion and belief.
4
Shared knowledge guides social conduct.
individual cognition.
Cultural models Social representations Repeated assembly
Common sociocultural Collectivity of ideas, Recurrent resources in
knowledges that are visual representations, sociocultural environ-
materialized in humans and images that guide ments. Shared realities,
social conduct. Cultural the understanding values, beliefs and knowl-
models shape shared and communication edges, practices, along
5
reality. of reality. with existing artifacts
and choices are
repeatedly assembled.
Assemblies allow a
continuous ow and
change in culture that
organize the forms of
human sociality.6
valid. Through the descriptions of existing values and their use in the
context of consumerism, advertisements both obtain continuity in
culture by perpetuating those values and maintain a change in society
via the prescriptions of consumerist choices.
Advertisings work is incremental, and is never at odds with the
already existing structure of culture and society. The phenomena of
Hallmark holidays such as Valentines Day or Mothers Day is a good
example of the establishment of consumerism in culture through
advertisings use of existing sentiments and such customs as gift-giving.
Thus, advertising not only mirrors culture through its uses of cultural
values, but also reproduces and reshapes it. The creation and maintenance
of consumer culture is intertwined with other cultural forms such as
YAV U Z : M E D I AT I N G M E S S AG E S 275
popular music, lm, and television, mixing the values of consumerism
with those of popular media.
Advertising, then, is a form and vehicle of structuration that enables
the continuity and transformation of society and culture by helping the
reproduction and shaping of human practices and interaction. According to
the sociologist Anthony Giddens, structuration refers to the process of
interaction between human beings where sociocultural rules and resources
produce and reproduce such social systems as society.7 As a structuration
mode of culture, advertising helps shape sociocultural reality by using and
making meanings. The processes of cultural production and reproduction
are enabled by advertisements repeated use and assembly of such
sociocultural elements as cultural models and social representations as
conventional rules and resources. With its sociocultural inuence,
advertising can be considered a boundary domain between production
and consumption: it helps products enter mainstream culture after
their manufacture. Within this process, advertising relies on culture as a
source of inspiration. The examples below will show how advertisements
use sociocultural elements in attributing meanings to products.
Communication of those elements and meanings through messages in
advertisements and consumers use of these elements and meanings in their
sociocultural environments enable the structuration process of advertising.8
advertising as a boundary domain

Products have two lives: one during the design and manufacturing
processes (production life), and another in the world of markets and use
(consumption, or sociocultural life). The production life involves the
social and technical dynamics of the design and manufacturing process:
actors involved, and their interests, actions, politics, and power relations,
in addition to technological capabilities and methodsall aspects that
shape the course and the outcome of the design and production process.9
The consumption life, on the other hand, is the process of products
circulation in society through their sale in markets and use in personal
and social environments.
According to Jean Baudrillard, advertising marks the distinction
point between labor and product. When disconnecting the product from
its history, advertising represents it as a new, simple, and pure being.10
Therefore, advertising is a boundary domain between the lives of
production and consumption. It is during the course of advertising that
products change dimensions and are made neutral entities, stripped
of the politics that enter into the production process. Advertising
enables the transfer of products into mainstream culture. Production
lives are not revealed unless products functions and reasons for
existence are questionedfor example, when products are recalled for
faulty production, or when their impacts on humans and the
environment are questioned in the public realm.
Advertising is the means through which most products step into
their consumption life. Humans actively use products and their
meanings to operate in sociocultural environments. Products serve as
markers of history, society, culture, and of individual and collective
identities. They have sociological, cultural, and psychological meanings
and functions in addition to economic and utilitarian ones.
culture as inspiration in advertising processes

Advertising creativity does not solely involve aesthetic design skills. It
also involves communication and interpersonal skills: how well creative
directors (or so called creatives) can observe and tap into shared
knowledges; how well they can tell a story to which viewers can relate;
and how well their advertisement resonates in peoples minds.
Consequently, as mediators between clients and consumers, creatives
are most successful when they can truly observe and understand
culture and human truths, and nd creative ways to communicate that
culture back to the people who help form the culture. As one art director
puts it, creatives are experts on culture.11 They are usually socially and
culturally curious and are attuned to what is happening in their
environment. Creatives often say advertising is not about what happens
inside advertising rms, but what happens in the outside world that they
bring into work.
Creatives own experience of life and of people in societywhat
they wear, how they talk, what they read, and where they goare all
relevant and necessary for communication in advertisements. Various
assignments creatives undertake also allow them to be exposed to a
variety of diKerent products, subcultures, and situations. For example,
assignment- and context-relevant research (on products and target
audiences), context-relevant immersion (such as going to places where
the product to be advertised might be), and context-relevant
observation (rsthand experience of target audience behavior) are all
methods of cultural inspiration. In addition, such artifacts of culture as
television, music, the internet, lm, books, and newspapers are
signicant tools that help inspiration, as they all elaborate on culture.
Thus, advertising creativity relies heavily on culture as a source of
inspirationit is situated in and constructed by culture. In order to be
successful, advertisements need to have clear messages that achieve
shared communication so that viewers can read the intended messages
and act upon them in the way advertisers want. In ads, sociocultural
elements are repeatedly assembled and are associated with products.
Ads, therefore, perpetuate those elements, continuously maintaining
culture while also bringing a change. Part of this change comes from
meanings attributed to new products, while another is the reection of
the changing dynamics of culture, trends, and values. Because culture is
not static, a constant observation of change and variety is needed. In
summary, creatives immersion into culture assures the clarity and the
sharedness of their messages.
communication of sociocultural
elements in advertisements
Because space and time are limited in print ads and television
commercials, creatives look for shortcuts in communicating messages.
Within the available space and time, creatives strive to make the most
desired impact on viewers. There are several visual and textual/verbal
methods of representing and communicating cultural models and shared
knowledges to viewers in print and television advertisements. These
methods involve the employment of:
visual and textual/verbal expressions of linguistic metaphors;
visual comparisons;
visual expressions of symbols and widely shared meanings with
symbolic value;
storytelling;
stereotypes.
The use of metaphors in ads helps the attribution of meanings to products
in addition to achieving instant communication through resemblance
(figs. 1 and 2 ). Comparisons both clarify an ads message and strengthen
the meanings that are attached to a product. Symbols and meanings
that have symbolic value are very eKective in achieving instant
communication because they constitute cultural knowledges that are
shared by the members of a society. Linguistic metaphors, symbols, and
symbolic meanings are shared knowledges, cultural models, and social
representations in themselves that, when attached to products, endow
them with their meanings. Visual and textual/verbal storytelling takes
place when creatives make up events, reference to the happenings in
real life, and show snapshots or reels of these instances. Because they
constitute real-life events or likely situations, it becomes easy for
viewers to understand and relate to the messages in advertisements.
The use of cultural stereotypes in advertisements results not only
from the desire to achieve instant communication but also from the
request of clients. Many tend to prefer stereotypical representations of
people in their culturally accepted social roles; as they invest large sums
of money into advertising, companies do not want to take the risk of
being irrelevant to their target audiences. While creatives believe in the
shock value and attention-getting quality of using non-stereotypical
representations, they are usually inclined toward using stereotypes for
achieving shared communication and relevance.12 Considering the
cultural eKect of advertisements, the downside of using stereotypes is
that they fossilize shared beliefs about people even though they may be
wrong or negative (fig. 3 ).
Cultural transfer occurs through the repeated assemblies of
creatives own experiences, shared knowledges, cultural models, and
social representations in mediating products to target audiences in
advertisements. The process of transfer perpetuates and constructs
realitythe realities that revolve around the meanings of products and
the social representations that were used in association. For example,
what it means socially and psychologically to use a certain brand of car
is a message that is achieved through the process of cultural transfer
in gure 4. The types of cultural models and social representations
employed in ads, obviously, depend on how a creative and his or her
client company want the target audience to perceive the promoted
product. The mediation of products needs to intersect with individuals
and societys physical and psychological expectations in order to create
the desired eKectprovoking a positive thought and desire causing the
buying behavior in consumers.
figs. 1 and 2 Canon EOS-1D advertisement part I. The original ad is in the form of an
eight-page magazine insert. Each panel shown here constituted a separate page.
fig. 3 In order to make its point, this ad locates its message at the juxtaposition of
visual representation and shared knowledges of elderly women. It is attention grabbing
and inuential because it challenges the cultural expectations and stereotypical beliefs
about elderly women.
To further analyze how stereotypes, storytelling, and symbols in visual
representations are employed, it is useful to look at two advertisements,
by General Electric and Toyota, as examples.
general elec tric advertisement

The denotative level of the General Electric (GE) advertisement involves
the text (the headline and the copy), an African American couple holding
hands, a kitchen setting with chrome appliances, and some art objects in
addition to the artworks on the walls (fig. 5 ). The syntagmatic structure
conveys an idea of a couple with diKerent tastes and occupations. The
idea, art marries technology, which also is the headline, is illustrated
through the juxtaposition of the couple with diKerent interests. The
same idea also resonates in the appliances advertised: they are sleek,
stylish, high-technology products.
At the connotative level, we have two signs in focus: the male and
the female. From her funky clothing and hair and a piece of artwork she
is holding, we understand that the female is evidently the person who
represents the art side of the marriage. She, as a sign, and the signs of
appliances correspond: she signies art, aesthetics, beauty, and style,
which resonate on the artfulness and beauty of the appliances. The male
she is holding hands with is clothed in a white lab coat, which signies
the idea of an engineer or technician. With his neat haircut, clothing, and
accessories, he signies detail-orientedness, intellect, reliability, and
orderliness. Judging from his appearance, we understand that the male
represents the technology side of the marriage, which resonates on
the idea of the state-of-the-art technological intelligence of the
appliances. The orderliness, coupled with the smile on the casts faces,
conveys an idea of user-friendly technology.
The kitchen setting is lled with artworks and colorful and stylish
objects. The signs of artworks in relation to the kitchen convey the idea
that the kitchen is the females territory. The ower paintings on the
wall, the colorful owers in the vase, and the reddish pot on the stove
tell the viewer that the woman takes on the classical domestic female
roles such as decorating and cooking. The male cast is evidently the
breadwinner who works outside. Even though the kitchen is the females
territory, he participates in making important household choices, such as
fig. 4 Toyota Camry Solara advertisement
picking out appliances. From a paradigm of roles, the creatives who

designed the ad chose conventional cultural models and stereotypical
social and domestic roles for the female and the male represented in this
particular ad. Symbols are extensively used in the visual representation
of the cast and the kitchen.
The headline as a sign has a denitive role: without it, it is hard to
understand the story. The contrast in the appearance of the couples is so
striking that the strong sign of holding hands may not be enough by
itself to convey the idea that the couple is married or emotionally engaged.
The text indicates how GE appliances combine art and technology and
therefore are suitable to people with diKerent tastes.
toyota prius hybrid system advertisement

A denotative reading of the Toyota Prius advertisement reveals a gray
car in front of a garage in a green garden (fig. 6 ). A female in a gray
pantsuit holding dry cleaning looks back at the car while walking in the
fig. 5 General Electric advertisement
opposite direction. A male child with his bag and lunchbox is running before
the female. The story of the ad conveys a message of a busy, educated
mother who is portrayed as coming home after work and after running
some household errands that involve picking up dry cleaning and
dropping oK and picking up her children. The headline suggests that she
has forgotten to pick up her other child, Jason. The claim of the ad is that
the Toyota Prius is an environmentally friendly electric/gas car that handles
inegcient driving exemplied through the depiction of a busy mother.
A more detailed reading of the advertisement reveals several
important signs that help the overall syntagm. The womans clothing
signies that she is a professional. From her clothing and the dry cleaning
she carries, we assume that she works outside of the home either part-
time or full-time. Her slim gure implies that she is a health-conscious
person. It is not clear whether she is a single mother or she is married; in
any case, she appears to undertake such conventional female domestic
roles as taking care of kids and running household errands. Her schedule
fig. 6 Toyota Prius advertisement
can get hectic; we know this from her forgetting to pick up her other son.
The choice of a female as opposed to a male as the parent is compatible
with the conventional cultural perspective of females and their social
and domestic roles.
The boy happily runs home not knowing or worrying that his
mother forgot to pick up his brother. The house appears to be a decent
suburban house with well-cared lawn and bushes. The abundance of
greenery and the blue sky are used symbolically and are in harmony with
the advertisers claim that the Prius is an environmentally friendly car. It
suggests that greenery and the blue air can stay as they are when one
drives this car. The signs on the upper right side require more than lay
cultural knowledge to interpret, but judging from the symbolic use of
green color on the car-shaped leaf, the gas and electric symbols on the
upper left corner, and the overall feeling of the ad, it would be safe to
assume that the signs show how exactly the car is environmentally
friendly. The logo, tagline, and the internet address all embedded on a
picture of a leaf signify how Toyota is committed to the environment.
The copy as a linguistic sign further attempts to persuade viewers
why Toyota Prius is egcient and environmentally friendly. It suggests
that because the car provides a more intelligent way to drive, owners can
concentrate on other things such as not forgetting to pick up their
child. The usage of cultural models and knowledges through the visual
representations of an instance from life assists in viewers understanding
and decoding of this advertisement.
making and using meanings

On the consumers part, reading the messages in advertisements
requires cultural literacy that comes from lived experiences and
participation in sociocultural life. Communication can be largely shared
or interrupted depending on an individuals uptake on sociocultural
reality. As members of a society, viewers actively engage in the
construction of meaning in advertisements by judging from the visual
representations of cultural models, stereotypes, shared reality, and
knowledge. These representations are important social and cognitive
tools. Subscription into such beliefs as stereotypes provides consistency
that, in a cognitive viewpoint, is necessary for the function of human
beings in sociocultural environments.
Similarly, viewers understanding of material products is inuenced
through the cultural content and context within which these products
are presented. Humans use products as social-psychological tools to
operate in a sociocultural environmentin their interactions with others,
in perceiving reality, and in their overall social conduct. When people use
products in their daily lives, they also use the meanings and relevant
cultural models that are used in advertisements, allowing the emergence
of sociocultural lives of products.
Individuals and social groups use products and their meanings in
making statements about their identity, marking social space, and in
understanding and making sense of their environments and situations
that reside outside the individual (fig. 7 ). Sociocultural identities are
built, displayed, reenacted, and perceived through the use of models,
representations, and meanings. Meanings of products are essential for
making identities visible.13
When consumers buy new products, symbolic meanings play
important roles in decision-making, even more so than traditional aspects
such as cost, resources, and utility.14 Consumers use the meanings
embedded in products in creating and surviving social change: by
expressing cultural categories and ideas, cultivating ideas, creating and
sustaining lifestyles, and constructing notions of the self.15 Products
complement individuals through the symbolic meanings that are
constructed through advertising and society. As sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu argues,
choosing according to ones tastes is a matter of identifying
with goods that are objectively attuned to ones position and
which go together because they are situated in roughly
equivalent positions in their respective spaces, be they lms or
plays, cartoons or novels, clothes or furniture; this choice is
assisted by institutions . . . [such as] magazines . . . which are
themselves dened by their position in a eld and which are
chosen on the same principles.16
Meanings, representations, and identities (of humans and institutions),
then, are all intertwined aspects of shared reality that dene ways of
being and behaving.
Material meanings, through the exhibition of products in social
spheres, compose material images and identities of their users.
Individuals regard their own and others possessions as symbols of
identity through the personal integration of the objective and symbolic
aspects of objects. Social psychologist Helga Dittmar argues that to
have is to be; products are a part of their owners extended self that
constitute symbols used in the personal and social aspects of identity.17
Products serve as tools for individual psychological aspects such as
completing the self, lling inadequacies, and reagrming peoples lives.18
They also serve in broader levels to constitute shared realities through
their symbolic meanings and constitute a concrete history of an
individuals past as much as a societys.19
Thus, advertising marks the beginning point of the dissemination of
cultural context. When people decode advertisements and use
advertised products, the dissemination of cultural context and meanings
not only substantiates the cultural models, knowledges, and reality used
in the advertising mediation process but also establishes products in
fig. 7 eBay advertisement. The normal looking male cast on a childrens tricycle
presumably shows how tattooed, hard-core riders perceive leisure motorcyclists and others.
mainstream culture. Making meanings through advertisements is a

spiraling process that continuously evolves. While it maintains the
structural elements in culture, it ensures a continual change.
conclusion
Advertising is a boundary domain that symbolizes the distinction between
the production and consumption lives of products. In advertisement
development processes, politics of production are concealed and
products are attributed new cultural meanings as they are prepared for
mass consumption. Products are given meanings to be used in their
sociocultural lives through the culturally situated creative processes of
the advertising practice. When mediating messages to viewers in
designing ads, creatives use commonly shared cultural models, knowledges,
and reality to achieve communication. These sociocultural elements not
only promote products but also help in the attribution of meanings.
Advertisements represent idealized forms of lifestyles and identities
interwoven with the existing cultural models and social representations,
blurring the line between desire and necessity. The desired object
becomes a social need in adjusting to and operating in a consumerism-
oriented culture. It is in the interaction between the individual with
others and material artifacts that these representations, knowledges,
and realities, as well as stereotypes come to exist. Participation into
sociocultural life requires the use of the sociocultural elements. People
use the cultural messages and meanings in advertisements to construct
and make sense of culture, society, and others. Sociocultural lives of
products are important tools that help people operate in sociocultural
environments. Products become extensions of self, making visible
identities through the meanings they hold.
It is important to note that advertisings inuence is indirect or
implicit because the representations of products are shaped through
existing cultural elements, exhibition of lifestyles, identities, and
associations of meanings with products. Through this approach,
advertisements not only become relevant to consumers and are easily
apprehended, but they also dene and create individual and
sociocultural identities, contributing to individuals and societys self-
perception. They describe and prescribe ways of seeing, being, and
behaving. Therefore advertising enables the function of individuals in
sociocultural environments, dening the nature of culture and society
along the way.
When advertisements are circulated in society and consumed by
viewers, their representations of cultural models contribute to the
reproduction of cultural reality and society at large. As a form of
structuration, advertising enables the continuity and transformation of
society and culture because it helps shape human cognition, conduct,
and interaction. It maintains and transforms sociocultural reality by
using and making meanings.
notes
1. Jon Steel, Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1998), xxi.
2. Ibid., ixx.
3. Jib Fowles, Advertising and Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
1996), 15761; Alice Courtney and Thomas Whipple, Sex Stereotyping in Advertising
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1983). See also Stewart Ewen, All Consuming
Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988);
Bruce W. Brown, Images of Family Life in Magazine Advertising, 19201978 (New
York: Praeger, 1981).
4. Term coined by Linnda R. Caporael, The Evolution of Truly Social Cognition: The
Core Conguration Model, Personality and Social Psychology Review 1, no. 4 (1997):
27698.
5. Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
6. Caporael, The Evolution of Truly Social Cognition.
7. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Anthony Giddens, New Rules
of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (New York:
Basic Books, 1976).
8. Data used in this paper come from a doctoral dissertation research conducted
between 2000 and 2003. The original research involved investigations of
advertisement development processes and the perceptions of cultural messages
and representations in advertisements. The research process involved interviews
with creative directors and consumers, the goal of which was to understand the
ways in which culture enters into the advertising process and is used to make
meanings in addition to revealing how representations of sociocultural elements
are perceived by consumers and are used in their daily lives.
9. The production lives of products are beyond the scope of this paper and therefore
will not be analyzed. For the social aspects of design processes and politics of
technology, see Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of
Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), and Langdon Winner, The
Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), respectively.
10. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 175.
11. Personal communication with a creative person who wanted to remain
anonymous. Interviewed for my dissertation research project, conducted between
2000 and 2003.
12. One tactical downside of using non-stereotypical representations in
advertisements is that they attract the attention to themselves, keeping focus oK
the real message. They tend to hinder the communication of the intended
meaning of an ad. This was a shared concern in the creatives interviewed for the
original research. As much as they disliked the negative cultural eKect of using
stereotypes and did not want to use them, creatives pointed to this negative side.
When the goal of advertising is to convey a clear message with the least amount
of noise and ambiguity and to prevent the intended meaning from becoming lost
among alternative meanings, the use of stereotypes prevails.
13. My use of the term identity encompasses both the individual and social aspects.
While I believe that individuals have certain micro-qualities that are peculiar to
them, this micro-self is always situated in historical, social, and cultural junctures
and therefore cannot be detached from the larger social or macro-dimensions.
Furthermore, identity is not completely stabilized at the micro and macro levels
and can be diversied in group-based contexts. Group-based identity is also what
denes individuals.
14. Helga Dittmar, The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have Is to Be (Hemel
Hempstead: Wheatsheaf, 1992).
15. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic
Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), xi.
16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 232.
17. Dittmar, The Social Psychology of Material Possessions, 95.
18. Ibid., 101, 110.
19. N. Laura Kamptner, Personal Possessions and Their Meaning in Old Age, in
Shirlynn Spacapan and Stuart Oskamp, eds., The Social Psychology of Aging
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989).
chapter 19
Compartiendo Sueos/
Sharing Dreams: An Interview
with Toni OBryan
AUDREY BENNET T
Toni OBryan is a seventeen-year veteran in the eld of graphic design.

Since 1999, she has been the principal of KaChing, a creative studio based
in Venice Beach, California. Her career spans the elds of print, motion,
and interactive design, as well as marketing and product development.
She is a design advocate and promotes sustainable and responsible
design solutions within both local Venice community organizations and
internationally. Her work has appeared in national and international
publications such as Prints Regional Design Annual, American Corporate
Identity, Prints Best Logos and Symbols, Logos of American Restaurants,
and American Advertising Awards 2. She has received awards from
various organizations including the American Advertising Federation,
International Association of Business Communicators, the Direct
Marketing Association, and Meads Top Sixty. She has been a judge and
instructed students on portfolio development for the American
Advertising Association, and she is a member of the Graphic Artists
Guild, Gen Art, and NEW Entrepreneurs, Friends of ICOGRADA. She also
serves on the programming committee for the Los Angeles chapter of
the American Institute of Graphic Arts; as a board member of the Center
for Cross-Cultural Design of the American Institute of Graphic Arts; and
as a founding board member of Conscious Commerce of Venice, a non-
prot community-building foundation.
291
figs. 1 and 2 Kristin Rogers Browns (left) and Mara Rogals (right) interpretations of
sharing dreams as part of the AIGAs Center for Cross-Cultural Designs group
exhibition titled Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams co-organized by Toni OBryan,
Victor Casaus, and Hector Villaverde in 2004
What is Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams?

It is a collaborative graphic art project that I co-developed with Victor
Casaus and Hctor Villaverde. I selected ve U.S. designers, and Victor
and Hctor selected ve Cuban designers. Each brought varying degrees
of design experience and were diverse (in regards to their demographics
and psychographics) within their country. All shared the desire to
reach out and connect with colleagues in the other country. We asked
both groups to respond visually to the following questions: What are
your dreams? Why are they important? What inuences them? Is it the
environment? People? Events? Culture? Crossing time zones and language
barriers, the designers were encouraged to look outside of their day-to-
day context for inspiration and feedback, and to explore how diKerent
communities of inuence aKect their work. They created individual posters
that were displayed in a group exhibition in Havana, Cuba, in June 2004,
at the Sixth Annual Digital Art Colloquium at the Cuban Institute of Art
and Cinema. At the event, the designers shared their project experiences
with attendees. It was a rewarding opportunity for the designers to meet
each other in person, connect, and share their ideas, inspirations, and
inuences in greater depth.
Which problem did this cross-cultural collaborative

project attempt to address?
The specic problem we were attempting to address was two-fold. It was
cross-culturalhow do graphic artists who speak diKerent languages
collaborate on an art project?and it was technological, in that the artists
were located in diKerent parts of the world; thus, how do we facilitate a
computer-mediated collaboration across cultural, geographic, and
political boundaries?
The project entailed cross-culturally collaborating on the development
of culture-specic aesthetics, and using technology to break geographic
barriers for intercultural communication exchange. The questions posed
to the designers became even more intriguing in light of the participating
countries isolation from one another. Ogcial diplomatic relations have
been nonexistent between Cuba and the United States since the embargo
was imposed in 1962. For decades, U.S. designers were unable to
figs. 3 and 4 Andrea Dezss (left) and Oscar Fernndezs (right) interpretations of
sharing dreams
B E N N E T T: C O M PA R T I E N D O S U E O S / S H A R I N G D R E A M S 293
fig. 5 Eduardo Molts interpretation of sharing dreams
communicate with their Cuban counterparts. The internet has changed

everything. Compared to the U.S., where the internet is readily available
and most designers have easy, high-speed connections, internet access
in Cuba is limited, slow, and can be unreliable. Still, Cuban designers
overcame hardships to cross time zones and language barriers. Books,
supplies, magazines, television, and reference materials were not readily
accessible for the Cuban designers, and due to economic factors, the
Cubans predominately used PCs rather than the Macintosh platform
used by most U.S. designers. Economics also cast an unavoidable
inuence on the project. Both groups gained perspectives on Cuban
economic hardship and the impact of recession, which aKected many of
the U.S. designers.
Which communication technology did you

use to facilitate the collaboration?
All ten graphic designs came together in a computer-mediated design
space facilitated by email. Ohine, they designed their posters, while
corresponding by email to share their ideas and works-in-progress.
Multithreaded virtual discussions took place about the projects progress
figs. 6 and 7 Fabin Muozs (left) and Jos Gmez Frequets (right) interpretations
of sharing dreams
and the various ways each designer was approaching the task of visualizing
sharing dreams. Email allowed everyone to keep in touch and stay up
to date on the projects progress, sharing developing designs, ideas,
questions, and answers, all the while getting to know each other and
sharing dreams of a future of mutual friendship and understanding.
How would you evaluate the graphics derived

from this cross-cultural experiment?
Due to its location and cross-cultural history, Cuba has one of the most
vibrant artistic histories in the Caribbean. Forming a geographical
maritime crossroad between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, Cuba has
long fed oK cultural exchange across the Atlantic Ocean.1 Pop culture
icons and mega-brands tend to be what the world views as the American
aesthetic; the elusive concept of American-ness is often dened by
cinema and television.2 People often assume, mistakenly, that the arts
are truly universal, that music is the universal language, and that great
art will naturally be appreciated by all, no matter which culture is exposed
to it. They forget that the artsand designare also part of a persons
set of cultural understandings of the world and reality.3
figs. 8 and 9 Hector Villaverdes (left) and Pedro Juan Abreus (right) interpretations
of sharing dreams
Due to the nature of the Cuban marketplace, companies are not

concerned with brand recognition or competition. Overstimulation was
not a big issue for Cuban designers. In the U.S., on the other hand, it was
a big concern and problem to overcome. The bold graphics so well known
from the 1960s propaganda and movie posters are considered by many as
the Cuban aesthetic. Orishas (deities) and other folkloric imagery from
African and indigenous roots are also common visual representations of
the Cuban culture. But the Cuban designers in this exchange did not choose
to use folkloric imagery or execute their designs in the two-dimensional
style of the famous movie and propaganda posters. Instead they pulled
from various inuences from other cultures and time periods. Only one
Jos Gmez Frequets posterwas distinguishably inuenced by one major
culture, the pop icon imagery of the U.S. The other posters reected a
culmination of inuences, indistinguishable as having a Cuban
aesthetic. This is common of designers in Cuba today. The images were
completely assembled from digitally designed or imported imagery. The
U.S. designers also developed their posters with digital elements with
the exception of Andrea Dezsos design. She created her poster by hand,
with colored pencils, and then scanned the drawings into the computer.
Designers in this project pulled context from personal inspiration, as
they were encouraged to both embrace their cultural aesthetics and look
beyond the stereotypical. Thats just what they did. No restrictions were
allowed on the interpretations of the words dreams and sharing. Nor
were any placed on what needed to be included in the commentary. In
each poster, you may have noted that each and every designer illustrated
a unique interpretation of sharing dreams. Each designer shared freely
what dreams meant to them. Whether waking or sleeping dreams,
cultural inuences were woven into the work visibly and subconsciously.
This project is important, as it is the rst time these two groups of
designers so close but so distant have been able to connect and create
positive inuential works together. Through the process of sharing,
participation and community-building seeks to set an example of how
the risks and dreams of designers can create a positive impact on the
future. Designers are powerful communicators. At this time of globalization
and rapid advances in technology, designers have a large responsibility
to look outside of their own backyards and truly research how to
conscientiously and respectfully communicate with other cultures. As
there is a demand for cross-cultural design expertise within globalization,
there is also an opportunity to break down barriers, reach out to other
designers, and create together communicative projects that inspire
positive social change.
More information about Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams can be found within

the cross-cultural design community of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. To
see all of the original works, along with commentaries from the designers, see
http://www.kaching-creative.com/dev/sharing_dreams/ (American website) or
http://www.artedigitalcuba.cult.cu/ (Cuban website).
notes
1. Discovery Channel, 2002. Insight Guides: Cuba (New York: Langenscheidt

Publishers Inc.).
2. Lonely Planets Destination USA,
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/north_america/usa/culture.htm.
3. Henry Steiner and Ken Haa, Cross Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global
Marketplace (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994).
Section IV
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
chapter 20
Human Dignity and Human Rights:

Thoughts on the Principles of
Human-Centered Design
RICHARD BUCHANAN
As I walked on the shore of Cape Town to the opening ceremonies of a

conference on design in South Africa in the summer of 2000, I saw through
the rain and mist a small sliver of land in the bay.1 Naively, I asked my host
whether it was part of the peninsula that extends south of the city or an
island. With what, in retrospect, must have been great patience, she quietly
explained that it was not an island, it was the island. I was embarrassed,
but I knew immediately what she meant. I spent the rest of the evening
thinking about the political prisoners who were held on Robben Island,
human rights, and the irony of a conference seeking to explore the
reshaping of South Africa by design, held within sight of Table Bay.
I was helped in these thoughts by the address of the minister of
education, Dr. Kadir Asmal, who opened the conference by exploring the
meaning of design, the need and opportunities for design in South Africa
and, most importantly, the grounding of design in the cultural values and
political principles expressed in the new South African Constitution. I have
never heard a high government ogcial anywhere in the world speak so
insightfully about the new design that is emerging around us at the
dawn of a new century. Perhaps everyone in the audience was surprised
by how quickly and accurately he captured the core of our discipline and
turned it back to us for action. Many of his ideas were at the forward
300
edge of our eld, and some were further ahead than we were prepared
to admit. For example, I believe we all recognized his signicant
transformation of the old design theme of form and function into the
new theme of form and content. This is one of the distinguishing marks
of new design thinking: not a rejection of function, but a recognition that
unless designers grasp the signicant content of the products they
create, their work will come to little consequence or may even lead to
harm in our complex world.
I was particularly surprised, however, by Dr. Asmals account of
the creationand here he deliberately and signicantly used the word
designof the South African Constitution. He explained that after
deliberation the drafters decided not to model the document on the
familiar example of the United States Constitution, with an appended
Bill of Rights, but rather to give central importance from the beginning
to the concept of human dignity and human rights. Though he did not
elaborate on the broader philosophical and historical basis for this decision,
it is not digcult to nd. Richard McKeon, co-chair of the international
committee of distinguished philosophers that conducted a preparatory
study for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s,
explains that the historical development and expression of our collective
understanding of human rights have moved through three periods: civil
and political rights were the focus of attention in the eighteenth century;
economic and social rights were the focus in the nineteenth century;
and cultural rightsformally discovered in the preparatory work for the
Universal Declarationbecame the focus in the twentieth century.2
The U.S. Constitution begins with a statement of political rights, and the
appended Bill of Rights is a statement of civil rights protected from
government interference. The document was properly suited to the
historical development of human rights in the late eighteenth century,
and in subsequent evolution the United States has gradually elaborated
its understanding of economic and social rights as well as cultural rights.
The South African Constitution begins with a statement of cultural rights,
suited to the current historical period in the development of human
rights. It seeks to integrate civil and political rights, as well as economic
and social rights, in a new framework of cultural values and rights,
placing central emphasis on human dignity. The result for South Africa is
a strong document, suited to a new beginning in new circumstances. The
301
opening article of the Constitution, quoted by Dr. Asmal, reminded me
of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
announces recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family.
Dr. Asmals account was both historically important and a
conscientious reminder of the cultural context of the conference. However,
the next step in his argument brought the room to complete silence.
He made the connection between practice and ultimate purpose that is
so often missing in our discussions of design, whether in South Africa,
the U.S., or elsewhere in the world. Design, he argued, nds its purpose
and true beginnings in the values and constitutional life of a country
and its people. Stated as a principle that embraces all countries in the
emerging world culture of our planet, design is fundamentally grounded
in human dignity and human rights.
I sensed in the audience an intuitive understanding of the correctness
of this view, though the idea itself probably came as a surprise, because
we often think about the principles of design in a diKerent way. We tend
to discuss the principles of form and composition, of aesthetics, of
usability, of market economics and business operations, or the mechanical
and technological principles that underpin products. In short, we are
better able to discuss the principles of the various methods that are
employed in design thinking than the rst principles of design, those on
which our work is ultimately grounded and justied. The evidence of this
is the great digculty we have in discussing the ethical and political
implications of design and the consequent digculty we have in conducting
worthwhile discussions with students who raise serious questions about
the ultimate purpose and value of our various professions.
The implications of the idea that design is grounded in human dignity
and human rights are enormous, and they deserve careful exploration.
I believe they will help us to better understand aspects of design that
are otherwise obscured in the ood of poor or mediocre products that
we nd everywhere in the world. We should consider what we mean by
human dignity and how all of the products that we make either succeed
or fail to support and advance human dignity. And we should think
carefully about the nature of human rightsthe spectrum of civil and
political, economic and social, and cultural rightsand how these rights
are directly aKected by our work. The issues surrounding human dignity
302 DESIGN STUDIES: HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

and human rights provide a new perspective for exploring the many
moral and ethical problems that lie at the core of the design professions.
What is important at the moment, however, is that we may
recognize in Dr. Asmals argument the major tenet of new design
thinking: the central place of human beings in our work. In the language
of our eld, we call this human-centered design. Unfortunately, we
often forget the full force and meaning of the phraseand the rst
principle which it expresses. This happens, for example, when we reduce
our considerations of human-centered design to matters of sheer
usability, and when we speak merely of user-centered design. It is true
that usability plays an important role in human-centered design, but the
principles that guide our work are not exhausted when we have nished
our ergonomic, psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies
of what ts the human body and mind. Human-centered design is
fundamentally an agrmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search
for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human
beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and
cultural circumstances.
This is why Robben Island remained in my thoughts on the rst
evening of the conference. It reminded me that the quality of design is
distinguished not merely by technical skill of execution or by aesthetic
vision but by the moral and intellectual purpose toward which technical
and artistic skill is directed. Robben Island, site of the prison in which
Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were isolated for so long
from direct participation in the national life of South Africa, is another
symbol of twentieth-century design gone mad when it is not grounded
on an adequate rst principle. It is a symbol of the wrongful use of
design to shape a country in a system that denied the essential dignity of
all human beings. Robben Island belongs with other disturbing symbols
of design in the twentieth century, such as that which my colleague, the
architecture and design historian Dennis Doordan, chillingly noted:
the Holocaust was one of the most thoroughly designed experiences of
the twentieth century, with careful attention to every obscene detail.3
Dr. Asmals argument carried an urgent message for the work of
the conference and for everyone in the design community. Not only is
design grounded in human dignity and human rights, it is also an
essential instrument for implementing and embodying the principles of
BUCHANAN: HUMAN DIGNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 303

the Constitution in the everyday lives of all men, women, and children.
Design is not merely an adornment of cultural life but one of the
practical disciplines of responsible action for bringing the high values of
a country or a culture into concrete reality, allowing us to transform
abstract ideas into specic, manageable form. This is evident if we
consider the scope of design as it aKects our lives. As an instrument of
cultural life, design is the way we create all of the artifacts and
communications that serve human beings, striving to meet their needs
and desires and facilitating the exchange of information and ideas that is
essential for civil and political life. Furthermore, design is the way we plan
and create actions, services, and all of the other humanly shaped processes
of public and private life. These are the interactions and transactions
that constitute the social and economic fabric of a country. Finally, design
is the way we plan and create the complex wholes that provide a framework
for human culturethe human systems and subsystems that work either
in congress or in conict with nature to support human fulllment.
These range from information and communication systems, electrical
power grids, and transportation systems to managerial organizations,
public and private institutions, and even national constitutions. This is
what leads us to say that the quality of communications, artifacts,
interactions, and the environments within which all of these occur is the
vivid expression of national and cultural values.
We are under no illusion that design is everything in human life, nor
do we foolishly believe that individuals who specialize in one or another
area of design are necessarily capable of carrying out successful work
in other areas. What we do believe is that design oKers a way of thinking
about the world that is signicant for addressing many of the problems
that human beings face in contemporary culture. We believe that
conscious attention to the way designers work in specialized areas of
application such as communication or industrial design is relevant for work
in other areas. And we believe that general access to the ways of design
thinking can provide people with new tools for engaging their cultural
and natural environment.
As we work toward improving design thinking in each of our special
areas of application, we also contribute to a more general understanding
of design that others may use in the future in ways that we cannot now
anticipate. The urgent message of Dr. Asmal is that we must get on with

our work as designers in all of these areas if we are to help in sustaining
the revolution that has been initiated in South Africa and the wider revolution
in human culture that is taking place around us throughout the world.
First published in Design Issues 17, no. 3 (Summer 2001).
notes
1. This essay is based on a paper delivered at a national conference organized by the

Design Education Forum of Southern Africa, Reshaping South Africa by Design,
held in Cape Town from June 22 to June 24, 2000.
2. Richard McKeon, Philosophy and History in the Development of Human Rights,
in Zahava K. McKeon, ed., Freedom and History and Other Essays: An Introduction to
the Thought of Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
3. Personal communication with Dennis Doordan, 1999.
BUCHANAN: HUMAN DIGNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 305

chapter 21
Impact: Inspiring Graphic Design

through Human Behaviors
ROSHI GIVECHI, IAN GROULX, AND
MARC WOOLLARD
graphic designer as research-participant (the start)

Human-centered research methods, aimed at deriving insight for design
from people and their needs, mindsets, and experiences, are useful to
graphic designers, enabling them to gain understanding from end users and
stakeholders rsthand and to build on a clients perspective. Consequently,
they expand their concept directions early on in the design process.
At our rm, IDEO, designers create services, spaces, and experiences
to help a range of businesses innovate. IDEO evaluates potential solutions
for innovation through design thinking: observing, experimenting,
collaborating, rapid prototyping, and creating connections through
storytelling. At the heart of this process are more than four hundred
multidisciplinary individualsdesigners, engineers, human factors experts,
and business strategistswho combine to create a culture rich in creativity,
acumen, knowledge, expertise, and empathy. IDEO designers use human-
centered research methods to put people at the center of its collaborative
design process (fig. 1). Guided by human factors expertise, hands-on
research marks a fundamental step at the start of our design process.
Contextual observationsresearch and interviews closely tied to a core
subject in its own environmenthelp us understand a particular subject
more sensibly; analogous experiencesloosely related to a core subject
306
fig. 1 The IDEO process
but typically within a diKerent industrygive us inspiration. Simply put,

immersion in the eld, early on, triggers design thinking.
An example of this process can be illustrated with the opportunity to
improve the patient experience at a hospital. In contextual observation,
one spends time at hospitals, looking and listening, interviewing
patients and staK. With hospital consent, the designer might role-play as
an actual patient to recognize more closely what a patient experience
may feel like. The resulting ndings can inspire design. Alternatively, one
may visit hotels or spas to see how the analogous experience might
translate from one industry, hospitality, to another, healthcare.
Where do graphic designers t into this process? Theyre getting
involved earlier, actually. Unlike other skill sets, such as human factors or
interaction design, the graphic designer has not historically participated
in the research phase. Typically, graphic design was reserved for
packaging the nal design solutions, often becoming the communication
tool for a clients business strategy. However, the graphic designers
ability to help craft a design argument and package the design thinking
earlier in the process helps ensure that the research highlights remain
top of mind. We believe intimacy with the content informs the graphic
designers creative thinking and problem-solving ability. It also gives the
designer the luxury of collecting visual evidence from the research so
they can later express these discoveries in more compelling ways. Simply
put, our research methods enable graphic designers to create more
relevant and informed design solutions through their personal contact
with the content from the start of the design process.
307
graphic designer as user advocate (the observation)
While human-centered research inspires our design, exposure to people
were designing for also allows us to tell stories to our clients with more
legitimacy. By learning what matters to people, we can help our clients
embrace the practical needs of their potential audience and convey the
emotional drivers that trigger them to respond to their world. The
clients interest in having us represent the voice of the user gives us the
authority to steer decisions that ultimately shape the nal design. (During
this process, graphic design can also aid in prioritizing discoveries and
making the rough content approachable, understandable, and memorable
to the client.) By designing for peoples expressed or latent needs, we
assist our clients in serving their customer more successfully.
designed to inspire, not to validate (the unfocus groups)

Many companies rely on focus groups to validate designs that are close
to nal production. A weakness in this approach can be that the ndings
often seem as mediocre or sterile as the experience itself. At IDEO, we
host less conventional unfocus groups early enough in the design process
to inspire designers. Typically lasting two to three hours, this event brings
together a deliberately broad range of user types to share a relevant
experience or object from their lives. The individuals are then asked to
create their ideal products, services, or environments with standard low-
tech materials, and explain the reasons behind their choices. This casual
research forum allows people to expand on a subject matter by sharing
personal stories and participating in rough prototyping. While not the
sole way in which to understand what motivates the user, this approach
presents a quick and informal way to learn more about our target, get
more perspectives in a compressed timeframe, and complement our
contextual observations. By observing their behavior and listening to
their perspectives, the designers and human factors specialists then
interpret insights from the unfocus group for design.
insights feed our intuition (the advantage)

Traditionally, and often successfully, graphic designers have relied on
their own intuition to generate design solutions. However, insights culled
from observations themselves provide a powerful source of inspiration
that often leads to stronger design thinking. These solutions are more

appropriate and tailored for individuals for whom the object, service, or
environment is designed. In classic graphic design professions, research
typically relies on a combination of the clients point of view, aesthetic
research, and the graphic designers gut impression and personal design
style. However, graphic designers working in an environment that
advocates human-centered design need to invest more time developing
their design through in-the-eld observation of people relevant to the
project topic. By looking at how people interact with other people,
products, services, or environments, and learning about the needs and
perspectives of the various stakeholders rsthand, graphic designers are
better able to interpret ndings and to build a design argument for the
nal product. Simply put, intuition, coupled with insight, gets designers
appropriately further in the design process, and gets them there faster.
graphic designer as editor (the organization)

In participating in observations at the research phase, graphic designers
bring particular skills to the table. As communication experts, they
intrinsically ask questions to reduce complexity and reveal information
hierarchy. They continually extract and organize insights in order to
ultimately t them into the comprehensive, concise, and compelling
deliverables that the clients desire.
Not unlike those who design multi-modal touch-points for consumer
experience in both the physical and virtual worlds, the human-centered
graphic designer can envision the entire context around a given project,
linking together all areas that become expressions of a brand. They can
more easily step back and look at the collection of information,
establishing appropriate connections. With their intimate knowledge of
information design and packaging content, the graphic designer
complements the teams multidisciplinary expertise by highlighting and
streamlining ndings from the start and encapsulating these ndings for
the nal product. Planning for the end deliverable, the graphic designer
continually lters and edits along the way, prototyping toward the most
eKective visual and communicative style for the nal designs.
graphic designer as story teller (the communication)

We are nding greater value in building the project story earlyas early
as the research phase. Storytelling reinforces insights and ideas and
becomes a powerful tool to ensure that all involved interpret and agree
G I V E C H I , G R O U L X , A N D W O O L L A R D : I M PA C T 309
upon the same set of insights. The visual representations of the thinking
keeps people on the same page, and consequently enables our client to
interact with us through content itself. Not only does the graphic design
skill enable us to best couch our research and ideas in compelling ways,
the stories themselves work as communication tools to foster the
relationships we aim to build with our clients.
To that end, authenticity is key. Nothing strengthens a design
argument more than the ability to connect a solution to its source of
inspiration, particularly when a given concept is based on rsthand
research with real people doing real things in real spaces. As such,
leveraging relevant research artifacts as a means to reect the
inspiration and reasoning becomes invaluable.
As research grounds our design, graphic design in turn legitimizes
concepts for our clients. Detailed visualization enables clients to better
envision potential opportunities. If were designing a product, delivering
a prototype with tailored packaging and a cohesive brand vision better
completes an overall design strategy. In environmental graphics, graphic
design helps make spaces look legitimate. The visual details, often aimed
at highlighting human behavior within context, enable clients to more
easily interpret our concepts and envision alternate opportunities. If
were designing a space, we visually represent the setting in which
people interact, delineating the roles, tools, and services that may be in
place. If were providing recommendations on business strategy, we use
visual frameworks and diagrams to simplify and codify the information
to create a more understandable and memorable representation. We all
know that visual communication provides alternatives for expressing
information. Yet graphic design helps frame the evolution of the research
and design more creatively and cohesively, making it easier to follow the
design argument throughout the design process.
The graphic designers problem-solving instincts and agnity for
making information approachable clearly complement the teams design
eKort. The need to package our research and recommendations into
evocative stories sparks a greater need for strong visual communication.
However, our hands-on research approachour ability to witness and
interpret latent human needsremains a powerful way to ground and
diKerentiate design solutions, and becomes especially valuable to the
graphic designers ability to contribute as a whole.

chapter 22
Personas: Practice and Theory

JOHN PRUIT T AND JONATHAN GRUDIN
As software strives to provide more ne-grained support for a wider

range of people and activities, the need for designers and developers to
understand human behavior has grown. Usability or user research
professionals collect and work to comprehend data from diverse sources,
seeking to translate this understanding into an ability to anticipate user
responses to designs. Even more challenging, they will be more eKective
if they can communicate their understanding to other team members
who help in the design, development, and testing process.
Personas is an interaction design technique that has demonstrated
considerable potential for achieving these goals in software product
development. Personas are ctional characters, based on actual data,
that depict target user populations. The Persona method builds on
previous research eKorts, notably in marketing, and was popularized by
Alan Cooper in his 1999 book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.1
Personas consist of fully eshed-out ctional characters, as might be
encountered in a lm or novel, given specic ages, genders, occupations,
hobbies, families, and so on. Photographs and considerable supporting
information are provided for each of a handful of Personas used in a project.
The use of abstract representations of users originated in marketing,2
but Coopers use of Personas, their goals, and activity scenarios is
311
focused on design. He notes that designers often have a vague or
contradictory sense of their intended users and may base scenarios on
people similar to themselves. His goal-directed design provides focus
through the creation of ctional Personas whose goals form the basis for
scenario creation. Coopers early Personas were rough sketches, but over
time his method evolved to include interviews or ethnography to create
more detailed characters.3 His approach was elaborated upon in tutorials
by Kim Goodwin of Cooper Design, and in numerous workshops,
newsletters, online resources, and research papers.4
Prior to Coopers Personas method, others promoted some use of
abstract representations of users to guide design, such as user proles
and scenarios derived from contextual inquiry or user classes eshed out
into user archetypes and used as a basis for scenario construction.5
Coopers process of creating Personas, giving them goals, and building
scenarios around them proved to be particularly eKective.
In ve years of use, we and our colleagues have extended Coopers
technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability
methods. However, our use of Personas diverges in several ways.
Cooper emphasizes an initial investigation phase and downplays
ongoing data collection and usability engineering, which he said seems
like sandpaper . . . .Very expensive and time-consuming, it wasnt solving
the fundamental problem.6 In contrast, we believe that basing Personas
on real data is well worth the eKort in terms of establishing credibility
and achieving successful outcomes. Designers who claim to have an
innate ability to make intuitive leaps that no methodology can replace,
or who argue that We always design before putting up buildings,7
understate the value of appropriate user involvement throughout the
design and development process.
Personas used alone can aid design, but they can be more powerful
if used to complement, not replace, a full range of quantitative and
qualitative methods. They can amplify the eKectiveness of other methods.
Personas might help a designer focus. However, their greatest value
is in providing a shared basis for communication. Cooper emphasizes
communicating the design and its rationale among designers and their
clients, stating that Its easy to explain and justify design decisions
when theyre based on Persona goals.8 We have extended this, using
Personas to communicate a broader range of information to more

people: to designers, developers, testers, writers, managers, marketers,
and others. Information from market research, ethnographic studies,
instrumented prototypes, usability tests, or any other relevant source
can be conveyed rapidly to all project participants.
We have engaged in small and large Persona projects, illustrated in
this chapter by a limited use of Personas in designing the rst version of
the web browser MSN Explorer, and a more extensive eKort in support
of the Microsoft Windows product development team. The goal in each
case was to help the team identify and understand its target audience
as well as aid in design and development decisions for each specic
product release.
The MSN Explorer eKort started in January of 2000 and lasted about
ten months, though the actual creation of the Personas took about two
months. The project supported a product development team comprising
several hundred members. The Windows Persona eKort started around
March of 2001 and has continued through the present (2006), though
the initial creation and validation of the Personas took about three
months. The Windows product development team started with several
hundred members and grew to several thousand at the peak of the eKort.
In each project, teams were comprised of programmers, quality assurance
testers, program managers, designers, technical writers, product
planners, user researchers, and marketing professionals, among others.
Within the development team was a smaller group of Persona
creators. The MSN Explorer Persona team included one full-time
usability engineer and the part-time eKorts of a product designer and
two additional usability engineers. The Windows Persona creation team
consisted of twenty-two people: several technical writers, several
usability engineers, four product planners, and two market researchers.
After the Windows Personas were created, the ensuing Persona
campaign grew to involve the part-time eKorts of several usability
engineers, ethnographers, graphic designers, and product planners.
our experience with personas

We have actively used Personas, and rened our techniques for using
them, for over ve years. When the MSN Explorer eKort began in 2000,
we did not set out to create Personas. In fact, we were only vaguely
familiar with the concept. Our goal was to help a development team
PRUITT AND GRUDIN: PERSONAS 313

understand and focus on a set of target users. We read Coopers recently
published book and looked around the industry and within our own
company to see how other teams had dened their audiences and
communicated that information to their broader team. Many product
teams within our company had done signicant work with market
segmentation, user role denition, user proling, and ctional character
denitions created for use in scenario-based design. One specic
technique, under the name user archetypes, started around 1995 with a
single product team and focused primarily on product planning, marketing,
and product messaging.9 Their approach resembled marketing expert
GeoKrey Moores targeting customer characterizations, as described in
his 1995 book Crossing the Chasm.10 Over time, other product teams
adopted this method and adapted it to better suit product development.
Although much of the adoption and adaptation of Persona-like methods
by various teams happened independently, common issues arose and
similar solutions were developed. From others around the company who
had been directly involved with creating these user abstractions or who
were expected to use them in product denition and design, we found
that the early Persona-like eKorts suKered from four major problems, all
of which are also noted in a recent paper by sa Blomquist and Mattias
Arvola describing a Persona eKort that was not considered fully successful:
1. The characters were not believable; either they were
obviously designed by committee (not based on data), or the
relationship to data was not clear.
2. The characters were not communicated well. Often the main
communication method was a resume-like document blown up
to poster size and posted around the hallways.
3. There was no real understanding about how to use the
characters. In particular, there was typically nothing that spoke
to all disciplines or all stages of the development cycle.
4. The projects were often grassroots eKorts with little or no
high-level support (such as sugcient staK for creating and
promoting Personas, budget for posters or other materials to
make the Personas visible, or encouragement from team
leaders).11
Our approach, outlined below, was developed specically to address
these four problems, and has been further rened to address additional

issues encountered along the way (how best to create user abstractions?
how much can be ctional and how much should be based on data? what
data is most appropriate? how to combine diKerent types of data? how
to validate your creations? can multiple related product teams share a
common set of abstractions? how to determine whether the eKort was
worth it? did the product get better as a result? and so on). Our method
and process by necessity combined techniques gleaned from the
previous Persona-like eKorts with what we could learn from Coopers
book, which was not written as a how-to manual.
Our MSN Explorer Personas eKort suKered from several problems.
First, because this was new to us, we began with little idea of how much
work was involved and what would be gained. Thus, obtaining resources
and creating reasonable timelines were digcult. We started with no
budget and two people who had plenty of other work to do. We began
the Personas eKort as the product vision and initial planning were being
completed. By the time we nished creating Personaswhich took much
longer than expectedour team had fully completed the basic design
and specication phase of the cycle. We had no time or resources to do
original research, but were fortunate that several eld studies and
market research pertinent to our product had been completed by others.
Finally, the whole idea of using ctional characters to aid design was new
to most people on our development team, so there was much resistance
to overcome and education required.
When we began the Windows Personas eKort more than a year later,
our understanding of the method had grown tremendously through our
experiences and through sharing experiences with other Persona
practitioners.12 Because of the success of previous Persona eKorts and
the growing buzz about Personas around the industry, the method had
become more familiar and fairly well accepted by the development team.
We were given staK resources and a decent budget for posters, events,
and other promotional exploits. Most important, Personas were being
requested by executives and team leaders as well as members of the
design and development team. What we had set out to do in our rst
attempt was more likely to be achieved in this larger eKort.

prac tice details
Creating and Using Personas: Our Approach
The following is a bulleted sketch of our current process. Where
appropriate, we call out diKerences in the resource-lacking Explorer
Personas eKort and the resource-intensive Windows Personas eKort.
We attempt to start an eKort using previously executed, large-
sample market segmentation studies.13 Highest priority segments are
eshed out with user research that includes eld studies, focus groups,
interviews, and further market research. We use metrics around market
size, historical revenue, and strategic or competitive placement to
determine which segments are enriched into Personas. We try to keep
the set of characters down to a manageable number of three to six
Personas, depending on the breadth of product use.
Generally, we collect as much existing related market and user
research as possible (from internal and external sources) to help inform
and ll out the Personas. We have yet to start a Persona eKort in an area
that does not have some existing quantitative and qualitative data. Thus,
our own research endeavors typically start after we create our Personas.
Although we did not initially create full-on international or disabled
Personas, we included international market and accessibility information
in our Personas. Several of our partner teams have also created anti-
Personas, intended to identify people that are specically not being
designed for.
In our larger, Windows Persona eKort, involving twenty-two people,
we divided the team so that each Persona (six in all) had two or more
dedicated team members. At the other extreme, just two people created
all four MSN Explorer Personas, though a few others contributed to or
reviewed various aspects of the work from time to time. As mentioned,
this lighter eKort relied solely on existing user research, and as a result
generated far less detailed Personas.
The Windows Personas eKort settled on six Personas: Abby, the
active mother; Ichiro, the IT professional; Melissa, the mid-level
manager; Patrick, the progressive small-business partner; Sondra, the
small-business owner; and Toby, the typical teenager. To ll out these
Personas, the team drew on many research studies. We divvied up the
research documents, with each team member becoming well acquainted
with only a few studies. We then held agnity sessions where we

physically cut data points and interesting or relevant facts out of the
studies and pinned them to a wall to form groups of related ndings
across studies. The resulting groups of ndings were used in writing
narratives that told the story of the data.
As we wrote the Personas stories, we employed qualitative data and
observational anecdotes where possible. One goal that has yet to be
achieved is to have every statement in our Personas generated from or
related to user data and/or observation.
In all Persona eKorts, we utilize a central foundation document for
each Persona as a storehouse for information about that Persona (data,
key attributes, photos, reference materials, and so forth), accessible to
all team members via an intranet site. Figure 1 shows the table of contents
for a typical foundation document. Note that the foundation document
is not the primary means of communicating information about the
Persona to general team members (more on this below). Likewise, the
foundation documents do not contain all or even most of the feature
scenarios (for instance, walk-through scenarios are located directly in
the feature specs). Instead, the foundation document contains goals,
fears, and typical activities that motivate and justify scenarios that
appear in feature specs, vision documents, storyboards, and so forth.
Links between Persona characteristics and the supporting data are
made explicit and salient in the foundation documents. These documents
contain copious footnotes, comments on specic data, and links to
research reports that support and explain the Personas characteristics.
All Persona illustrations and materials point to the foundation documents,
enabling team members to access the supporting documentation.
Once a basic Persona description is written, we nd local people to
serve as models and hold one- to two-hour photo shoots to create visual
material to help illustrate and communicate each Persona. We have
avoided stock photo galleries because they typically oKer only one or
two shots of a given model, and the images are too slick.
For our Windows Personas eKort, after our Personas were created,
we set up sanity check site visits with users who match the Personas
on high-level characteristics, such as business owners who make
signicant use of a PC and spend a great deal of time traveling for work,
to see how well they match on low-level characteristics, such as having
digculty conguring their wireless connection when traveling or owning

a PDA but making little use of it for work-related tasks. We do this
because our creation method utilizes multiple data sources, many of
which are not directly comparable or inherently compatible. Once the
Personas documents and materials are in place, we hold a kickoK
meeting to introduce the Personas to the team at large (fig. 1 ).
OverviewAlan Waters (Business Owner)

Get to know Alan, his business and family.
A Day in the Life
Follow Alan through a typical day.
Work Activities
Look at Alans job description and role at work.
Household and Leisure Activities
Get information about what Alan does when hes not at work.
Goals, Fears, and Aspirations
Understand the concerns Alan has about his life, career, and business.
Computer Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities
Learn about Alans computer experience.
Market Size and Inuence
Understand the impact people like Alan have on our business.
Demographic Attributes
Read key demographic information about Alan and his family.
Technology Attributes
Get a sense of what Alan does with technology.
Technology Attitudes
Review Alans perspective on technology, past and future.
Communicating
Learn how Alan keeps in touch with people.
International Considerations
Find out what Alan is like outside the U.S.
Quotes
Hear what Alan has to say.
References
See source materials for this document.
fig. 1 The table of contents for a foundation document

Communicating our Personas has been multifaceted, multimodal,
ongoing, and progressively discloses more and more information about
them. Our foundation documents are available to anyone on the team
who wishes to review them, but they are not the primary means for
delivering information. Instead, we create many variations of posters,
yers, and handouts over the course of the development cycle. For the
Windows Personas we even created a few gimmicky (and popular)
promotional itemssqueeze toys, beer glasses, and mouse pads, all
sprinkled with Persona images and information. We created websites
that host foundation documents, links to supporting research, related
customer data and scenarios, and a host of tools for using the Personas,
such as screening material for recruiting usability test participants,
spreadsheet tools, comparison charts, and posters and photos. In an
ongoing Persona fact of the week email campaign, each Persona gets a
real email address used occasionally to send information to the
development team. Figure 2 shows two general posters designed to
further a teams understanding of the Personas. One compares
important characteristics of four Personas. The other communicates the
fact that our Personas are based on real people and tries to provide a
sense of the essence of a Persona by providing quotations from real
fig. 2 Two general posters: one comparing characteristic across Personas; the other
presenting real quotes from users that t the prole of one of our Personas

fig. 3 Two more targeted posters: one communicating aspects of security and privacy
across all of our Personas; the other showing how certain types of hackers can target
one of our Personas
users who are similar to that Persona. Figure 3 shows two posters from a
series that provides information specically about how customers think
about security and privacy. The rst again provides real quotes from
users who t our various Persona proles. The second poster shows how
a real hacker targeted people who resemble one of our Personas.
We instruct our team in Persona use and provide tools to help.
Cooper describes Persona use as a discussion tool, noting that They
give discussions of skill levels a refreshing breath of realism, and that
Personas end feature debates.14 This is valuable, but we have generated
additional activities and incorporated them into specic development
processes. We created spreadsheet tools and document templates for
clearer and consistent Persona utilization. As an example of how Personas
can become explicitly involved in the design and development process,
gure 4 shows an abstract version of a feature-Persona weighted priority
matrix that can help prioritize features for a product development cycle.
In the example, the scoring in the feature rows is as follows:
-1the Persona is confused, annoyed, or in some way harmed by
the feature;
0the Persona doesnt care about the feature one way or the other;

Persona 1 Persona 2 Persona 3
Weight: 50 35 15 Weighted Sum
Feature 1 0 1 2 65
Feature 2 2 1 1 150
Feature 3 -1 1 0 -15
Feature 4 1 1 1 100
Etc.
figure 4. A feature by Persona weighted priority matrix
+1the feature provides some value to the Persona;

+2the Persona loves this feature or the feature does something
wonderful for the Persona even if they dont realize it.
The sums are weighted according to the proportion of the market each
represents. Once completed, the rows can be sorted according to the
weighted sum, and criteria can be created to establish which features
should be pursued and which should be reconsidered. In this example,
features 2 and 4 should be made a high priority for the development
team; feature 3 should probably be dropped.
We make a strong eKort to ensure that all product and feature
specication documents contain walk-through scenarios that utilize our
Personas. We do the same with vision documents, storyboards, demos,
and so forth. Unfortunately for the MSN Explorer eKort, we completed
our Personas too late in the process to utilize this approach. During the
Windows Personas eKort, we collected Persona scenarios from across the
product team in a spreadsheet that enabled us to track and police the use
of the Personas. This also enabled us to roughly gauge the direction of a
product as it is developedfor example, how many scenarios are written
for Toby vs. Abby, when we know Abby is a higher priority target.
Design teams have made creative visual explorations based on the
Personas. More specically, they created branding and style collages by
cutting and pasting images that feel like our Personas from a variety
of magazines onto poster boards (fig. 5 ). They then utilized these boards
to do a variety of visual treatments across several areas of our product.
In another Persona eKort, we took these types of explorations to focus
groups to understand in detail what aspects of the designs were appealing
and how they worked together to form a holistic style. Although the

fig. 5 A Persona focused style collage
Personas were not critical to this process, they served as a springboard

that inspired creation.
As a communication mechanism useful to the Persona team itself,
we create Persona screeners and recruit participants for usability and
market research. We then categorize, analyze, and report our ndings by
Persona type. For the Windows Personas, we went to the extreme of
creating a Persona user panel. Through an outside rm, we established a
ve-thousand-person panel of users that matched our Persona proles.
We polled the panel on a regular basis to better understand reported
activities, preferences, and opinions, as well as reactions to our feature
plans, vision, and implementations. We have not aged our Personas over
time, but we do revise them as new data becomes available. Unlike
Cooper, we support a strong, ongoing eKort to obtain as much quantitative
and qualitative information about users as possible, thereby improving
the selection, enrichment, and evolution of sets of Personas.
One of our technical writing groups, a partner to the Windows team,
utilized the Windows Personas to plan and write how-to and reference
books for the popular press. In doing so, they expanded the Personas to
include notions of learning style, book usage patterns, and so forth, to
enrich how they authored for specic audiences. Although this has not
happened for the Persona eKorts described here, in other eKorts the

fig. 6 A design exploration based on the style collage in gure 5
quality assurance test team has used Personas to organize bug bashes
and select/rene scenarios for their quality assurance testing (fig. 6 ).
For the Windows Personas, we undertook a large eKort to reconcile
two sets of target audiences (one in the form of Personas and one in the
form of customer segments) when a team working on a related product
was directed to be better together with our product. These examples
show that once Persona use takes hold, inuences can spread beyond
the immediate team. In the next section we discuss some of the resulting
benetsand risks.
results
Benets of Personas
It is clear to us that Personas can create a strong focus on users and work
contexts through the ctionalized settings. Though we have not tried to
formally measure their impact, the subjective view of our Personas and the
surrounding eKort by the development team has been favorable. A wide
range of team members (from executives to designers and developers)
know about and discuss our product in terms of the Personas. Weve seen
Personas go from scattered use in early projects to widespread adoption
and understanding in recent product cycles. Our Personas are seen
everywhere and used broadlyin feature specs, vision documents,
storyboards, demo-ware, design discussions, bug bashes, and even used

by VPs arguing for user concerns in product strategy meetings. Not only
have our development teams engaged with Personas, but correspondingly
they have engaged with our other user-centered activities. Our Persona
campaigns generated a momentum that increased general user focus and
awareness. With our most recent eKort, weve had partner teams
building related but diKerent products adopt and adapt our Personas in an
eKort to enhance cross-team collaboration, synergy, and communication.
The act of creating Personas has helped us make our assumptions
about a target audience more explicit. Once created, the Personas have
helped make assumptions and decision-making criteria equally explicit.
Why are we building this feature? Why are we building it like this?
Without Personas, development teams routinely make decisions about
features and implementation without recognizing or communicating
their underlying assumptions about who will use the product and how it
will be used. The feature-Persona weighted priority matrix described in
the previous section is a good example of this. Using that tool inevitably
results in favored or seemingly important features being pushed down in
the list. When this happens, teams must be very explicit with their
reasoning to get a feature back in the plan. We stress to the team that
this tool is not golden, but a guide; exceptions can and should be
made, when appropriate.
Personas are a medium for communication; a conduit for information
about users and work settings derived from ethnographies, market
research, usability studies, interviews, observations, and so on. Once a
set of Personas is familiar to a team, a new nding can be instantly
communicated: Abby cannot use the search tool on your web page has
an immediacy that a subset of participants in the usability study had
problems with the search tool does not, especially for team members
who now, for all intents and purposes, see Abby as a real person. We
have found this to be extremely powerful for communicating results and
furthering our teammates understanding of the Personas.
Finally, Personas focus attention on a specic target audience. The
method helps establish who is (and consequently who is not) being
designed for. Personas explicitly do not cover every conceivable user, but
they help focus sequentially on diKerent kinds of users. For example, a
quality assurance engineer can one day test a product focusing on
Abby scenarios, another day focusing on Toby scenarios. As stated in

the previous section, this works for testers and other product team
members, in bug bashes, for example. An experienced tester reported
feeling that he was identifying the right kind of problems in drawing
on knowledge of a Persona in guiding his test scripts and activities.
In the software industry, code testing is undertaken mainly to see
that the software matches the specication. It is not widely believed
that testers can benet from understanding users. But research conducted
by one of us years ago in a diKerent company indicated otherwise. A
development manger said,
I would say that the testing should be done by a group outside
Development, because Development knows how the code
works, and even though you dont want it to, your subconscious
makes you test the way you know it works. . . . See those
[Quality Control Testers] have nothing to do with customers.
Theyre not users.15
He then described one time that he circumvented the normal development
process to enlist two Field Support engineers, who interact with users on
a regular basis, in testing. They found more bugs than the assigned testers
by using the product the way they believed users would. He summarized:
The Quality Control group has a lot of systematic testing, and
you need some of that, but at the same time, you need
somebody who is essentially a customer. It is as if you had a
customer in house who uses it the way a customer would every
day, and is particularly tough on it and shakes all these things
out. Thats what these two guys did, and it was just invaluable.16
Despite the success, however, the manager was prevented from
repeating this scenario: testing was to be done by Testers. Our experience
suggests that familiarity with Personas can enable Testers to develop an
ability similar to that of the Field Support engineers, to use the product
like a customer.
Risks of Personas
Getting the right Persona or set of Personas is a challenge. Cooper
argues that designing for any one external person is better than trying to
design vaguely for everyone or specically for oneself.17 This may be true,
and it does feel as though settling on a small set of Personas provides
some insurance, but it also seems clear that Personas should be developed

for a particular eKort. In making choices it becomes clear that those
choices have consequences. For example, the choice of Personas will
guide participant selection for future studies and could be used to lter
out data from sources not matching one of the proles.
Related to this is the temptation of Persona reuse. After the
investment in developing Personas and acquainting people with them, it
may be digcult to avoid overextending their use when it would be better
to disband one cast of characters and recruit another. It can be good or
bad when our partner teams adopt or adapt our Personas. DiKerent
teams and products have diKerent goals, so the Personas are stretched.
So far, such stretching has been modest and closely tied to data (because
our target customers do indeed overlap), but it is nonetheless a concern.
In addition, marketing and product development have diKerent
needs that require diKerent Persona attributes, and sometimes diKerent
target audiences. Marketing is generally interested in buyer behavior
and customers; product development is interested in end-users. Weve
had some success in collaborating here, but there are rough edges.
Finally, we have seen a certain level of Persona mania within our
organization and others. Personas can be overused. At worst, they could
replace other user-centered methods, ongoing data collection, or product
evaluation. Personas are not a panacea. They should augment existing
design processes and enhance user focus. Weve found that Personas
enhance user testing and other evaluation methods, eld research,
scenario generation, design exploration, and solution brainstorming.
discussion
How Personas Work
At rst encounter, Personas may seem too arty for a science-and-
engineering-based enterprise. It may seem more logical to focus directly
on scenarios, which after all describe the actual work processes one aims
to support. Cooper oKered no explanation as to why it is better to
develop Personas before scenarios.
Theory of Mind
For twenty-ve years, psychologists have been exploring theory of
mind, our ability to predict other peoples behaviors by understanding
their mental states. The concept was introduced in studies of

chimpanzeesdo they recognize the mental states of people or other
chimps?18and was subsequently used to explore childrens mental
development. Every day of our lives, starting very young, we use partial
knowledge to draw inferences, make predictions, and form expectations
about the people around us. We are not always right, but we learn from
experience. Whenever we say or do something, we anticipate the
reactions of other people. Misjudgments stand out in memory, but we
usually get it right.
Personas invoke this powerful human capability and bring it to the
design process. Well-crafted Personas are generative: once fully engaged
with them, you can almost eKortlessly project them into new situations.
In contrast, a scenario covers only what it covers.
If team members are given the statistic that 20 percent of our target
users have purchased cell phones, it may not help them much. If told Abby
has purchased a cell phone, they can immediately begin extrapolating how
this could aKect her behavior: they can create scenarios. We do this kind of
extrapolation all the time, we are skilled at itnot perfect, but very skilled.
The Power of Fiction to Engage

People routinely engage with ctional characters in novels, movies, and
television programs, often ercely. They shout advice to ctional
characters and argue over what they have done oK-screen or after the
novel ends. Particularly in ongoing television dramas or situation
comedies, characters come to resemble normal people to some extent.
Perhaps better looking or wittier on average, but moderately complex
stereotypes would become boring over time.
Method Acting and Focusing on Detail

Many actors prepare by observing and talking with people who resemble
the ctional character they will portray. As with Personas, the ctional
character is based on real data. An actor intuits details of the characters
behavior in new situations. A designer, developer, or tester is supported
in doing the same for the people on whom a Persona is based.
Method acting uses a great deal of detail to enable people to
generate realistic behavior. Detailed histories are created for people and
even objects, detail that is not explicitly referred to but which is drawn
on implicitly by the actor.

A ction based on research can be used to communicate. For
example, watching a character succumb slowly to a dementia on the
television show ER, one can understand the disease and perhaps even
design technology to support suKerers, if the portrayal is based on real
observation and data.
Merging Personas with Other Approaches

As noted above, we see Personas complementing other approaches,
or used where another approach is impractical.
Scenarios and Task Analysis

Scenarios are a natural element of Persona-based design and development.
In the words of the interaction design theorist John M. Carroll, a scenario
is a story with a setting, agents or actors who have goals or objectives,
and a plot or sequence of actions and events.19 Given that scenarios have
actors, and Personas come with scenarios, the distinction is in which
comes rst, which takes precedence. Actors or agents in scenario-based
design are typically not dened fully enough to promote generative
engagement. Consider Carrolls example:
An accountant wishes to open a folder on a system desktop
in order to access a memo on budgets. However, the folder is
covered up by a budget spreadsheet that the accountant
wishes to refer to while reading the memo. The spreadsheet is
so large that it nearly lls the display. The accountant pauses
for several seconds, resizes the spreadsheet, moves it partially
out of the display, opens the folder, opens the memo, resizes
and repositions the memo and continues working.20
The lifelessness of characters in such scenarios has been critiqued from a
writers perspective and by scenario-based design researchers who suggest
using caricatures, perhaps shocking or extreme ones.21 In an article on
scenarios in user-centered design, Susanne Bdker writes:
It gives a better eKect to create scenarios that are caricatures . . .
it is much easier . . . to relate to. . . . Not that they believe in
the caricatures, indeed they do not, but it is much easier to use
ones common sense judgment when confronted with a
number of extremes than when judging based on some kind of
middle ground.22

Bdker also recommends constructing both utopian and nightmarish
scenarios around a proposed design to stimulate reection.
Task analysis is a major method that attempts to create a similar
understanding through an explicit decomposition of work processes
into component tasks. This method involves considerable eKort and
results in complex formal representations that can be particularly
digcult to engage generatively. Task analysis generally leaves no room
for a construct as fanciful as Personas; an exception is the method of
interaction designers David Benyon and Catriona Macauley, which
includes detailed character sketches.23
These thoughtful analyses point to weaknesses in scenarios taken
alone. Unless based strongly on data, a scenario can be created to
promote any feature, any position (utopian or dystopian), and can be
digcult to engage with.
Personas need not be extreme or stereotyped characters; the team
engages with them over a long enough time to absorb nuances, as we do
with real people. This duration of engagement is critical. In a movie,
heroes and villains may be stereotyped because of a need to describe
them quickly, as with stand-alone scenarios. But in an ongoing television
series or a novel, predictable stereotypes become boring, so more
complex, realistic characters are more eKective.
Contextual Design and Ethnography

Contextual design, a powerful approach to obtaining and analyzing
behavioral data, is a strong candidate for informing Personas.24 As it has
evolved over the last two decades, contextual design increasingly
stresses communicating with team members ways to share knowledge
acquired in the eld. Personas are primarily a tool to achieve this and
thus a natural partner to this method.25
Ethnographic data may help the most in developing realistic
Personas when available in sugcient depth. Quantitative data may be
necessary in selecting appropriate Personas, but does not replace
observation. Again, the parallel to method acting arises.
Why not just use real people? Designing for a real person is better
than designing blind, but nearly everyone has some behaviors one would
not want to focus design on. Using a real individual would exclude or
complicate the use of data from market research, usability testing, and

so on. It could undermine the condence of team members in the
generality of particular behaviorsteam members do step back and
recognize that a Persona represents a group of people, as when they
describe testing six Abbys.
Participatory Design and Value-sensitive Design

Participatory or cooperative design focuses on the eventual users of a
system or application. It has the same goal of engaging developers with
user behavior and also enlists our ability to anticipate behaviors of
familiar people. When designing for a relatively small, accessible group
of people, this approach makes the most sense. Product development is
more challenging for participatory design.26
Early participatory design eKorts included a strong focus on socio-
political and quality of life issues. These issues are more signicant
today as the reach of computing extends.27 Although the industry and
many companies have engaged these issues at a high level, most
usability and interaction design techniques avoid addressing these issues.
Persona use brings sociopolitical issues to the surface. Each Persona
has a gender, age, race, ethnic, family, or cohabitation arrangement,
socio-economic background, and work and/or home environment. This
provides an eKective avenue for recognizing and perhaps changing
assumptions about users. If one populated a Persona set with middle-
aged white males, it would be obvious that this is a mistake.
Persona use does require decision-making. It isnt a science. If not
used appropriately, any powerful tool can take one down the wrong
path, as in lying with statistics or using non-representative video
examples. Personas are one such powerful tool. It is up to all of us
together to develop eKective ways to use them.

acknowledgments
We thank Gayna Williams, Shari Schneider, Mark Patterson, Chris Nodder, Holly
Jamesen, Tamara Adlin, Larry Parsons, Steve Poltrock, Jeanette Blomberg, and members
of the Microsoft Personas and Qual groups.
notes
Our method is described in-depth in John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle:
Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann,
in press).
1. Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us
Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Indianapolis: Sams Publishing, 1999).
2. GeoKrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
3. Kim Goodwin, Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim
Goodwin, interview by Matthew Klee, January 2001,
http://www.uie.com/articles/Goodwin_interview/.
4. Kim Goodwin, Goal-directed Methods for Great Design, tutorial presented at
CHI2002: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, April 2002), http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi2002/tut-sun.html#9. See
also, for example, John S. Pruitt, Holly Jamesen, and Tamara Adlin, Creating and
Using Personas: A Practitioners Workshop (workshop paper presented at 2002
Conference of the Usability Professionals Association, Orlando, Florida, July
2002), http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_events/upa_conference/2002/
program/workshops/wkshop_personas.php.
5. See JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish, User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Marie F. Tahir, Whos on the Other Side of
Your Software: Creating User Proles through Contextual Inquiry (paper
presented at 1997 Conference of the Usability Professionals Association,
Monterey, California, 1997); and Norunn Mikkelson and Wai On Lee,
Incorporating User Archetypes into Scenario-based Design (paper presented at
2000 Conference of the Usability Professionals Association, Asheville, North
Carolina, August 2000).
6. Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 20710.
7. Goodwin, Goal-directed Methods for Great Design.
8. Goodwin, Personas and Goal-directed Design.
9. Mikkelson and Lee, Incorporating User Archetypes into Scenario-based Design.
10. Moore, Crossing the Chasm.
11. sa Blomquist and Mattias Arvola, Personas in Action: Ethnography in an
Interaction Design Team (paper presented at 2002 NordiCHI Conference, Aarhus,
Denmark, October 2002).
12. John S. Pruitt, Holly Jamesen, and Tamara Adlin, Personas, User Archetypes, and
Other User Representations in Software Design, workshop paper presented at

2001 Conference of the Usability Professionals Association, Lake Las Vegas,
Nevada, June 2001, http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_events/
upa_conference/2001/reg/program/workshops/w2.html.
13. Art Weinstein, Dening Your Market: Winning Strategies for High-tech, Industrial,
and Service Firms (New York: Haworth Press, 1998).
15. Steven E. Poltrock and Jonathan Grudin, Organizational Obstacles to Interface
Design and Development: Two Participant Observer Studies, ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction 1, no. 2 (1994): 5280.
16. Ibid.
18. Janet W. Astington and Jennifer Jenkins, Theory of Mind Development and Social
Understanding, Cognition and Emotion 9 (1995): 15165; David Premack and Guy
WoodruK, Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?, Behavioral & Brain
Sciences 4 (1978): 51526.
19. John M. Carroll, Making Use: Scenario-based Design of HumanComputer
Interactions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
20. Ibid.
21. Lene Nielsen, From User to Character: An Investigation into User-Descriptions in
Scenarios (2002), http://widit.slis.Indiana.edu/irpub/DIS/2002/pdf17.pdf; Tom
Djajadiningrat, William W. Gaver, and Joep Frens, Interaction Relabeling and
Extreme Characters: Methods for Exploring Aesthetic Interactions (2000),
http://widit.slis.Indiana.edu/irpub/DIS/2000/pdf11.pdf.
22. Susanne Bdker, Scenarios in User-centered Design: Setting the Stage for
Reection and Action, Interacting with Computers 13, no. 1 (October 2000): 6175.
23. David Benyon and Catriona Macauley, Scenarios and the HCI-SE Design
Problem, Interacting with Computers 14, no. 4 (July 2002): 397405.
24. Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design: Dening Customer-Centered
Systems (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998); Blomquist and Arvola, Personas
in Action; Holtzblatt, Personas and Contextual Design (Sept. 2002),
http://www.incent.com/resource/columns/020913.html.
25. We discuss the relationship of Personas and participatory design in depth in
Jonathan Grudin and John Pruitt, Personas, Participatory Design, and Product
Development: An Infrastructure for Engagement, in Thomas Binder, Judith
Gregory, and Ina Wagner, eds., Proceedings of the 2002 Participatory Design
Conference (Palo Alto: CPSR, 2002). See also Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns
Wendall, and Shelley Wood, Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key
Techniques for User-centered Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 2004).
26. See the value-sensitive design website http://www.vsdesign.org.
27. Cooper writes that all things being equal, I will use people of diKerent races,
genders, nationalities, and colors. Realism, not political correctness, is his
stated goal. He stereotypes if he feels it will provide more credence and avoids
casting strongly against expectations if he feels it will undermine credibility.

chapter 23
Educating Design Citizens:

Passing on a Mind, Body,
Spirit Practice
ANN C. T YLER
the role of pedagogical prac tice

Teachers of design, including myself, build our own vision of the
discipline within our course development. We do this by drawing upon
many world experiences when determining the specic content of a
course: the models provided in our own education; our experience in
professional practice as designers and teachers; design history and theory;
theoretical models drawn from other disciplines; our own vision of design
and society; and the responsibilities we attribute to our role as teachers.
My own education as a designer was during the modernist design
period, when communication was still seen as having the possibility of
being objectivethat is, not taking a stance. The visual structures either
made the meaning of the subject matter clear (successful design) or
unclear (unsuccessful design). The meaning resided in the subject matter
only and not within the representation of that subject. Therefore, ethical
considerations also remained in the domain of subject matter. The client
was responsible for the subject matter, and so ethics in design focused
on the link between designer and client.1
I also grew up in a family focused on social issues and ones own
responsibility in the world. I lived through the struggles and successes of
the civil rights movement, came of age during the Vietnam War, and
333
came out at the height of the feminist movement and the early stages
of lesbian and gay liberation. In short, I was given a sense of history and
individual life lled with optimism and change through action within a
context of resistance.
My professional practice took the route from corporate design to
design for non-prots working for change in the realms of the political,
the social, the arts, and education. I began teaching after making these
changes in my practice.
This personal background has formed and inuenced my theoretical
development and my teaching. I attempted to show my students
possibilities by providing a range of subject matter in assignments.
Through this approach, I hoped that they were thinking about the world
and would realize, by seeing diKerent choices, that these choices had
consequences. I hoped they would be prepared to make their individual
choices in an informed manner.
I continued to emphasize the designer/client linkfocusing on the
content, the subject. This project emphasis provided exposure but it did
not provide students with the skills to see, let alone evaluate, their own
place in the world and the eKect our individual choices may have upon
the larger community. I think this focus on the subject is still a
holdover from being educated in a modernist design period, where the
goal of communication was objectivity,2 as well as my relationship to
professional practice, which locates the content within the sphere of the
client. My teaching developed, but remained within this construct.
My theoretical vision of design, though, had shifted from semiotic
analysis or linguistic structures that dene the audience as an interpreter,
to rhetoric, with its emphasis on argument that denes the audience in a
dynamic and participatory relationship within the communication
process. Communication, including visual communication, incorporates
existing beliefs of the viewer in order to make a clear and persuasive
argument. Through this necessary reliance on existing beliefs, design
contributes to maintaining, questioning, or transforming social values.
The audiences experiences within society and their understanding of (if
not adherence to) social attitudes are an essential aspect of argument.
This model addresses both the underlying belief systems relied
upon and communicated through design and the social and political
import of design in transforming and maintaining belief systems.3 The

model more fully matched my views of the import and function of belief
systems within society and the crucial role visual communication plays in
transforming or maintaining beliefs.
This shift from reading to participating can be looked at as a spatial
shiftit moves outward, providing a broader perspective; as a model,
rhetoric is able to address designs more hidden role in the world. I rmly
believe we need to acknowledge and take responsibility for the larger social
impact of our discipline and somehow incorporate it educationally.
Consequently, I felt the need to alter my teaching of design and give
students a broader visionbut I didnt know how. The answer came from
an inuence outside of my design practice which aided me in redening
the most basic aspect underpinning teaching and practice: skills.
redefining skills
I have been a martial artist for thirteen years. I practice an art based not
on sport but on a traditional philosophy dened as a mind, body, spirit
practice.4 It is a path to nonviolence. My teachers provide a broad range
of skills needed for nonviolent conict resolution, ranging from physical
techniques to skills involving analytical and critical thinking, language,
and voice. My teachers emphasize that these tools are accessible to and
can be taught to everyone.5
To a non-practitioner, martial arts may appear as a discipline involving
only physical skills, but it is much more than that. Martial practice links the
individual to community, requires a dedication to responsible action, and
cultivates self-discipline and generosity. The practice encompasses large
issues in the world.
In my desire to make the broad leaps and connections from skills
to the importance of design practice for my own students, I began to
see that my martial practice could provide a valuable model. This larger
denition of skills, as well as the thinking and writing I have done in
conjunction with the physical practice, has helped me redene the core
design course I teach.
an expanded vision
What we, as teachers and practitioners, ask students to think about in
the classroom is a statement we make dening what is important for
them to learn. Our assignments also communicate to students what we
T Y L E R : E D U C AT I N G D E S I G N C I T I Z E N S 335
believe a designers responsibility to be. It is a reection of how we see
our own responsibility in the world as practitioners, and we pass on that
vision of responsibility to our students. Equally signicant is what we
dont pass on. While we must take responsibility for what we make visible
to our students, we must also take responsibility for the things we leave
invisible. Invisibility is as much a part of communication, as much a part
of our society and history, as is visibility. We are actively communicating
that the things we do not make visible are either unimportant or not a
part of design practice or its concernsand therefore not necessary for
designers to consider in relation to their practice.
Design project assignments are vehicles for students to develop
visual communication skills, but how teachers dene skills can fall
along a wide spectrum, the narrowest being technical skills, followed by
formal skills grounded in aesthetics such as composition, color, and
typography. Further along this spectrum, we develop a students ability
to utilize these technical skills and formal elements to communicate
content and, nally, encourage an understanding of the communication
process, which involves the viewer or audience.
But where and how in this dynamic do we bring in an evaluation of
the content itself? Specic subject matter chosen by the faculty member
within assignments certainly communicates values. Previously, I created
the range of subject matter in my assignments to require a diKerent
technical skill development in each; to address diKerent formal issues;
and to necessitate consideration of diKerent audiences. I believed I was
asking students to think about a variety of issues and also was giving
them an idea about the diKerent areas of design practiceexposing
them to diKerent professional possibilities so that they might discover
where they want to direct their professional lives.
Within my teaching, I felt that the range of subject matter I asked
students to approach would also expose them to the impact of their
choices as designers. But presenting a variety of content does not teach
the skills to analyze that content within a much larger social framework.
Neither does it help the individual student see her/his connection to the
larger society and its history. In other words, I came to believe that the
skill spectrum I had dened was still too narrow, and I set about to
rethink and overhaul my course.

My goals were to incorporate the students own views and
experiences in the world, give them an opportunity to consider their
values, help reveal their connection to the world and its history, and
maintain the teaching of all the other skill sets along the spectrum
necessary to the development of a designer. This change in my thinking
led to a course that not only expanded the spectrum but deepened and
improved the teaching of traditional skills.6 In this way and others it
yielded many benets I had not anticipated.
a mind, body, spirit construc tion

The course I developed is divided into three sections based on the
concept of mind, body, and spirit taken from my martial practice. I
articulated those concepts in a manner specic to my own course
curricula that would accomplish my goals. Mind is dened as memory
and history, body as action, and spirit as hopes and dreams. The structure
also creates a conceptual rubric arcing over the course. Memory and
historyour individual and social historiesare a foundation for our
actions. The body implements action. And our spirits, or hopes and
dreams, provide the goals for our actions.
Each of these sections has multiple functions and goals. Each
incorporates readings and discussion, research, writing, and, of course,
visual work, and also utilizes diKerent methodologies for idea generation.
The readings and idea generation methods are part of expanding a
students thinking and therefore the resultant work. The new methods of
idea generation provide students with solutions they would not have
created through the common methods of brainstorming, sketching, and
discussion. The research and writing develop the students analytical and
critical skills as well as provide a deeper connection with the content.
As the sections progress, the formal parameters are more tightly
prescribed. The initial openness broadens the students approach to a
communication solution. The later limitations on formal solutions are
designed to accomplish goals specic to those sections. They also
provide parallels to professional practice and ensure that each student is
exposed to a breadth of formal issues.
sec tion 1
The Mind: Memory and History
Mind is dened as memory and history in order to bring out both the
motivation for our actions (our individual history) and our connection to
society and community (our collective history). Memory and history
provide a context for our personal beliefs, and the spectrum of beliefs
around us draws connections between personal and social history.
The readings in this section include a theoretical reading on
historiography (how history has been viewed and recorded in diKerent
periods);7 an essay on monuments and countermonuments (the visual
representation of historical events and various arguments about
memorializing);8 an essay on the visual alteration of history under Stalin
from David Kings The Commissar Vanishes;9 and an excerpt from the
feminist critical thinker Susan Sontags Regarding the Pain of Others, on
the ethics and the impact of viewing media images of other peoples pain
(an aspect of recording events).10 In addition to these readings, which
deal with the larger world, students also read a personal essay by the
essayist Bernard Cooper, in which he describes a brief encounter as a
child which, while insignicant to an outsider, was an extremely
important event because it altered his vision of the world.11
Students are then required to represent three diKerent events.
They may appear as obviously signicant or, to the outsider, seem small;
they can be humorous or seriousbut each event must be a part of the
students memory (placed there by direct or indirect experience) and
so is meaningful in some way within her/his own development. One
event is autobiographical (direct experience); another is within the
students own lifetime but of a larger social context (indirect experience);
and the third is also a larger social event, but taking place before she/he
was born (also indirect experience).12 All three events must be described
through the students own writing in a single page of text for each.
The events involving indirect experience require research which they
interpret and summarize in their own words. The events do not have
to be related.
During the rst part of the project, students create three visual
pieces, one for each event. There are no formal restrictions in terms of
format. They are encouraged to think very broadly and develop formats
specic to each event.

During the second part of the project, students must produce three
new pieces, each a combination of two events, covering every combination
possibility: event 1 and 2; event 2 and 3; event 1 and 3. The combinations
serve a number of pedagogical goals, as these are not merely fusions of
their earlier solutions. In this part, students are asked to consider many
possible relationships when trying to combine two events:
What are the issues of signicance in each event, and is there a
relationship between these issues? This requires students to analyze the
larger meanings inherent in the events theyve chosen. Often students
will at rst think their subjects are unrelated. For example, one students
personal event related to his experience as a child in Europe going to
jazz clubs, leading to his development as a jazz musician now living in
the United States. The event before his lifetime was the formation of
Israel and the dissolution of Palestine. In considering these two events
he began to focus on issues of emigration and immigrationthe
complex personal and political causes, impacts, and repercussions.
How would the content developed for one event reframe the ideas or
alter the impact in another? Another students personal event was about
skipping class in high school to attend a playoK baseball game, and the
event occurring in her lifetime was a hate crime in which a man of Asian
descent was murdered. In the rst version of the hate crime the student
hadnt really focused on the murder weapon: a baseball bat. The next
version of this incident became a much more powerful work, utilizing
images of batters and a stadium of onlookers. The piece also became
more complex: it now talked about hate and violence as sport and it
eKectively raised questions about audience, responsibility, and inaction.
Sometimes the combination yields an unexpected resonance,
arising not through similarity of action but through juxtaposition. A
personal story of childhood love combined with the Challenger
spacecraft disaster brought out the complexities of each story: explosion
refers to both disaster and the emergence of love; the intensity and
similarity of seemingly polar emotionsgrief and joyare revealed;
memorywhat we experience as children through tragedy and happiness
is explored. The piece became a poetic study in the mysteries of life and
death, random joy and violent accident.
How can a personal event be seen in a larger historical context?
How can we communicate the personal aspects of a historical event?
How can the language used to describe one event impact another by its
direct juxtaposition or by adopting the voice used in one event to describe
the others?
The combinations raise complicated questions and require students
to engage in critical thinking; to connect distant points in time; to
connect the personal and the historical; and to generate ideas through
diKerent methods. The variety and quantity of subject matter automatically
creates a stimulating environment for discussion, while the readings give
the students a common grounding. The sharing of the personal events
contributes to a sense of community in the classroom and an important
awareness of the diverse lives in that community (figs. 13 ).
fig. 1 I Wonder How It Would Feel to Be in an Explosion?, Dimitry Tetin, 2005. The book,
bound on both sides and opening in the middle, juxtaposes two stories: rst love and
the explosion of the Challenger spacecraft. The image is the students closed eye
represented through a halftone pattern that begins small and then expands and explodes
in joy on one side. On the other side the pattern starts with the literal explosion, passes
through grief, and coalesces into memory. The combination of stories brings out the
unexpected similarities and the randomness of lifes intense moments.

fig. 2 Anna Bandeko, 2005, combined
a form from her personal event playing
softball with the content of another
event, the passage of Title IX. The game
board reects the gender inequities in
sports that Title IX was intended to
address. The rules give boys repeated
advantages while girls are constantly
dealt setbacks and require much more
time and perseverance to move around
the board. The continued circularity of
the game reects the time before
Title IX, to its passage, to the current
eKorts to undermine and eliminate it
struggle, success, renewed struggle.
sec tion 2
The Body: Action
The body is a link between mind and spiritthrough the body, through
action, we manifest ourselves in the world. Our actions, aKected by the
intersection of our individual and collective histories, move us toward
our goals (our hopes and dreams)the desired result of our action.
Action can produce change or reinforce the status quoeither way
it is still action. Looking at actions and their results is part of seeing the
potential and real eKect we have on the world. Students research what
individuals and organizations have done to change the world, and they
also consider what they themselves will do in the world. The readings in
this section support this process of examination.
The rst reading is a philosophical piece by Alisdair MacIntyre on
what makes a practice.13 In describing practicesomething one does
over an extended period of timeMacIntyre discusses what he refers to
as external goods and internal goods. The external goods are elements
that could be achieved through other means and are not specic to that
practice alone, such as income or awards, and characteristically they
are such that the more someone has of them, the less there is for other
people.14 Internal goods, on the other hand, are those things that are
fig. 3 D-Day, Russell Eadie, 2005. D-Day is a book combining Eadies personal event,
a childhood experience that helped him realize the possibilities for himself in the world,
with D-Day, the event before his lifetime. His personal event utilized a coloring book
form that became lled in. The book that emerged begins with a soldiers romanticized
heroic vision of war and leads to the reality of violence and death.
specic to a practice and achieved only through an attempt at

excellence. It is through striving for internal goods that we contribute to
the whole community.15 Practiceswhether design practice or martial
arts practiceare comprised of both external and internal goods.
Thinking about both of these issues provides some of the skills to
critically examine ones work in the world.
Additional readings discuss our role as individuals within
community/society; the roles of organized groups such as corporations
within community/society;16 personal essays considering the principles
of nonviolent social change drawn from diKerent countries, such as
Arundhati Roys Ahimsa and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Letter from a
Birmingham Jail; and the potential results of action through the
creation and invention of objects, such as Jared Diamonds Necessitys

Mother. Lastly, Hanno Ehsess essay Representing Macbeth: A Case
Study in Visual Rhetoric lays the foundation for utilizing his
methodology as a support for idea generation.17 Ehsess model also
provides students exposure to a theoretical model in design.
After completing the readings and discussion, students research
one individual and one organization (not necessarily related) that have
contributed to social changeeither positively or negatively, as dened
by the student. From their research, students write a brief text about
each subject which focuses on the social/political impact of that person
or group. They analyze and summarize the condition that led to a
perceived need for change, the action taken to cause change, and the
resultant change brought about by that action.
This section of the course requires the imaging of processthe
imaging of change. Because students must represent change there is no
literal or representational solution: they cannot show the individual,
they cannot represent the organization, they cannot show only the
situation prior to the change, they cannot show only the situation that
resulted from change. Somehow through image and text they must
represent all of these elements.
While the rst part of the course requires the drawing out of a
moment in time to investigate its importance, this section requires the
collapsing of time into a single image construction. For this reason,
students are required to use a single large format, the poster, for each
subject. The large format allows focus on the image development and
also necessitates a distillation of text and concept. Students must
construct the image themselves (whether photographic, illustrative, or
typographic), because there is no other way to represent the content.
Ehsess essay is a grammatical model in which linguistic and
pictorial content are joined like parts of speech to form the message. His
model functions as an idea-generation tool in the project. While I nd it
too restrictive to limit students to only his categories, it can be an
important method of expanding ideas during concept development.
Ehsess categories, such as irony and metaphor, aid the student in the
creation of original, non-literal imagery. Literal representation can
become an aestheticized version of content and allow students to avoid
the hard thinking of connecting form to content in a complex way. With
literal representation, it is possible for students to develop a solution
without fully understanding their subject matter. For metaphor or
analogy to succeed, analysis and critical understanding are unavoidable.
I have found that students mainly choose changes they dene as
positive, and so the overall eKect provides an optimism regarding our
ability to have a positive impact in the world whether as individuals or as
groups of individuals acting together. The changes dened as negative
by students provide cautionary tales dening a need for action to build a
just society and the importance of considering the impact of all of our
actions, such as one students use of Richard Specks high-prole killings
of many nurses as the catalyst in raising awareness of the womens self-
defense movement and the importance of ghting back.
Because each student is researching diKerent individuals and
diKerent organizations both past and present, we all are exposed to a
breadth of information regarding human action. Often there are
personal connections to the individuals or organizations chosen. One
student focused on a scientist who developed the technology used to
repair her fathers heart. Another linked the two posters by selecting the
Indian activist Arundhati Roy and the organization Friends of Tilonia
(which the student supported and worked with in various capacities),
aiding women in a small Indian village to become more economically
self-sugcient. Several students in diKerent semesters produced posters
on the Army of God, a right-wing, Christian paramilitary group in the
United States. And the student who focused on the issue of borders in
the rst section continued that theme by selecting the organization
Doctors without Borders (fig. 5 ).
Through the readings, discussions, and examination of what other
people do in their lives, we all engage in self-reection. This section
points us to the obvious question: What are each of us doing as citizens
and what will we choose to do in the world? The readings provide
analytical skills for considering our own choices of action. Design is
placed in the context of a practice and the question of external and
internal goods. What will we get out of design and what will we contribute
through design? (figs. 49 )

fig. 4 So Youn (Sophie) Kim, poster, 2004. The reduction of the whale population and
Greenpeaces eKorts to prevent their destruction are represented here by combining
living creature and skeletal frame.
fig. 5 Jonas Bostrom, poster, 2004. fig. 6 Elle Luna, poster, 2005. Luna
Bostroms events contained the common focused on an authors vision of change by
theme of borders within immigration and representing the ctional character Howard
emigration, whether desired or forced. Rourk in Ayn Rands The Fountainhead.
The organization he chose, Doctors The architectural plan becomes Rourk
without Borders, continues this theme. himself, and while specically referring to
The image of the large hand becomes architecture, it also symbolizes Rourks ego,
continent, aid, and individual. The crossed the future, and the construction of beliefs
ngers represent hopethe desire to within literature.
create change.
fig. 7 Emily Boyd, poster, 2005. Nobel Prize recipient Wangari Maathais work
combating deforestation in Kenya is represented by a tree growing out of a heart. The
heart, made of earth, stone, and river represents the country as well as the major
individual effort required to implement such an extensive project.
fig. 8 Dimitry Tetin, poster, 2005. This posters event is the assassination by Gavrilo
Princip of Archduke Ferdinand. The tubercular image of Serbia has dual meanings: all
the assassins were poor men suffering from tuberculosis (at that time a death sentence);
the image also functions as a metaphor for Serbias occupation by a foreign power.

fig. 9 Dimitry Tetin, poster, 2005. The Farm Security Administration was created to
combat the dust bowl, which occurred after farming methods destroyed topsoil in
certain areas of the United States. The eKects of the FSA reinvigorated farmland.
sec tion 3
Spirit: Hopes and Dreams
Hopes and dreams represent our goals. They are where we want our
actions to lead. In Section 3, hopes and dreams are examined from two
perspectives: the material and the immaterial.
The readings address the links and the contradictions of these
desires in American society. Warren Susmans The Peoples Fair:
Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society describes the attempt to
link ideals and consumption in the 1939/40 New York Worlds Fair; an
excerpt from William Leachs Land of Desire describes the desire for goods
encouraged and created through advertising with the simultaneous
expansion of the credit system in the United States; students then read
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s I Have a Dream speech, which expresses
desire for the immaterialdesire for fairness and equality.18 Kings
speech creates an interesting combination with the other texts as he
uses the language of the material (credit, debit, checks, debts owed) to
convey his message. Combined with these readings is an excerpt from
The Business of Holidays on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.19 The reading
illuminates the purpose of the language in Kings speech as well as
ironically linking American ideals back to our consumer culture. Also
included in this group of texts is an excerpt from Victor Margolins The
Struggle for Utopia.20 Margolins book provides an example linking a
political ideal and the formal elements of visual expression, in this case
constructivism. The book also chronicles the failure of that utopian ideal
and the eKects on and choices by the two artists Alexander Rodchenko
and El Lissitzky.
Two of the readings, the excerpt from Land of Desire and I Have a
Dream, constitute the texts students must use within the project. The
common language and disparate dreams of the two texts provides the
basis for the project. The material and the immaterial are concerns we all
must address our entire lives, and students are themselves about to
make professional choices based on need and values.
The parameters of this project restrict the student to designing
a book using only typography, abstract shape, and color, thus requiring a
close examination of language. In the preliminary stages students must
experiment with a variety of possible multiple-page designs: presenting
the essays consecutively; presenting them simultaneously; foregrounding
Leachs text over Kings; and foregrounding Kings over Leachs. Students
are to focus on conveying the language similarities and the conceptual
diKerences. The potential relationships of the two texts begins to force
larger questions: How do we balance the material and the immaterial?
How do we deal with the inherent tensions between them when both are a
part of life?
If we foreground the material and reduce the emphasis on the
immaterial, then we point to a society where the energy of the people is
poured into the pursuit of consumer goods while losing focus on the ideals
that are its foundation. If we foreground the immaterial, our vast material
culture stands as an uncomfortable backdrop to our professed dreams.

fig. 10 Russell Eadie, Dreams, Hopes, and
Desires, 2005. Eadies book interweaves
the text from Land of Desire and Kings
I Have a Dream speech by presenting
both texts simultaneously. Words
common to each text form intersections
in the reading. These intersections point
to the conicts between the material and
immaterial desires of the American dream.
At this point in the course, because of all that has been required
earlier, students grasp quite well the digcult task before them. How can
the abstraction of grid, space, color, and typography communicate these
complex ideas? How can the emphasis on form and language illuminate
the inherent tensions and the inescapable links of the two texts?
By ending with these limitations, students not only solve a digcult
communication problem but also overtly engage in the use of abstract
forms to communicate belief systems. They come to understand through
their own work that these abstract tools, these formal skills are not
without meaning. Design can no longer be seen as simply a process of
aestheticizing information. Understanding the signicant role played by
design in conveying belief systems is a part of understanding the larger
implications of our practice and enables students to make informed
choices (figs. 10 and 11 ).
fig. 11 Elle Luna, 2005. This book incorporates texts from Land of Desire and Kings
I Have a Dream speech. One essay is seen completely on the front page of a thick,
false book while the other essay is on the back page. The book only opens by
removing the center section. This interior book opens up and unfolds to map the
connections and disconnections between the essays.

conclusion
In previous course structures I have taught, the subject matter comes
rst and students work backward delving into the meaning of that
subject. Working in this way, it is more digcult to make larger
connections, and the connections that are made seem outside of the
student. Very importantly, the meaning appears to emerge from the
subject. Whereas in the course outlined here, students begin with larger
ideas revealed through the readings and methodology. The subject then
emerges and becomes tangible because of particular individual, social,
and political constructs. The subject matter is a result, and if we alter the
constructs there will be a diKerent result. Subject matter is not a solid,
not a monolith with an unalterable perspective.
It is through belief systems that the subject matter is shaped.21 And
design is one of the active shapers of subject. If we are to rst
recognize the power of design and then, second, take responsibility for
the practice, it is crucial that we understand this process.
We are rst and foremost citizens in the world. Often, we leave this
unspoken, thinking that our example and responsible actions are enough
to communicate this most important issue. Our actions are extremely
important, and it is of little use to speak and not support that speech
with action. But leading by example is not enough. Being a responsible
citizen also means speaking out, nding ones own voice, and attaining
the skills required to be able to speak. The ability to speak is bound to
the development of critical and analytical skills.
This is something I learned from my own teachers in the martial arts.
Analyzing and speaking up involves skills that can be taught. Without
them, formal skills are of little relevance. To educate our students as
citizens, we must provide them with the skills to understand how we
give voice and how we aKect society in all our communication devices.
These skills best emerge when connected to a students own experience
in the world. This course is but one method of building these skills within
design education. I also hope that the coursemy own act of creation
within the practice of teachingis itself an act of citizenship by helping
others give voice to the larger issues of import in the worldan action
coming from my mind, my experience, and connected to their spirit.
notes
1. Philosophically, in modernist design, the designer functioned as the link between

client and audience, with the content and the content responsibility residing
within the client. Designers did make choices regarding clients and therefore
content selection, but it is a model of positivism or negativism by association. This
is a focus on who you do work for, not what the interior logic of your work is nor
what beliefs you draw upon and emphasize within your communication.
2. While a shift away from the notion of objectivity occurred within postmodernism,
that shift did not dismantle the construct of ethics by association. As U.S.
corporations developed a negative image in the 1960s and 70s, due in part to the
Vietnam War, weapons production, chemical production, and nuclear facility
issues, the responsibility of the designer became more emphasized. Design in the
United States had come to the fore through its association with corporate
America. The relationship now negatively impacted modernist design and helped
advance postmodernist graphic design. The result was a reductionist analysis
within which modernist graphic design was synonymous with corporations (bad),
and postmodernist graphic design was synonymous with individuals (good).
At rst, the typographic, image, and space development of postmodernist
design was used primarily in work produced for individuals, schools, and the arts.
This association reinforced postmodernist designers making a link based on ethics
between style and content. The vision continued an emphasis on subject matter
only. Ironically, postmodernist design can be seen as a visual underpinning of the
developing youth consumer culturethe foundation of the new corporate
America.
3. Ann Tyler, Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication, in this
volume.
4. I am a member of Thousand Waves Martial Arts & Self-Defense Center, NFP, in
Chicago, and practice Seido Karate. I also practice Kajukenbo Gung-fu. I am
indebted to my primary teachers Kyoshi Nancy Lanoue and Sensei & Sifu Sarah
Ludden for illuminating the practice.
5. One of my teachers, Nancy Lanoue, has been teaching self-defense for thirty
years and has, with other teachers at the center, created a highly developed
curriculum examining and teaching the analytical, language, and physical skills
needed to reduce violence.
6. The purpose of this essay is to focus on the theoretical and conceptual aspects of
this course. Therefore, I do not often refer to the technical and formal skills
provided through the projects. Teachers of design will readily recognize the
specic formal and technical skills within the projects.
7. Patrick Hutton, History at the Crossroads of Memory, in History as an Art of
Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 15460.
8. James E. Young, The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany, in
The Texture of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2737; and
Catherine M. SoussloK, Aesthetics and Catastrophe, Hayden White, Collapsed
History, and Aaron Kerner, Curators Statement, from the exhibition catalogue

for Collapsing Histories: Time, Space, and Memory (Santa Cruz: UC Santa Cruz
Sesnon Gallery), 2003.
9. David King, Introduction to The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsication of Photographs
and Art in Stalins Russia (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 913.
10. Susan Sontag, Chapter 8 in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2003), 11418.
11. Bernard Cooper, Burls, in Truth Serum (Boston: Houghton Mihin Company,
1996), 1527.
12. The denition of event as a physical manifestation, not a thought, is important. It
must have changed the students thinking but she/he cannot drop the event and
simply represent the thought. Events are time-based and have a beginning and an
ending (even if the eKects and related actions continue). And it cannot be beyond
the students ability to represent either in focus or time-frame. For instance, it
cannot be a war, but it could be a more limited occurrence within a war. While we
are aKected by war, the eKect is manifested and placed in our memory through a
compilation of events.
13. Alasdair MacIntyre, excerpt from After Virtue, in Robert N. Bellah, et al., eds.,
Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1987),
22338.
14. Ibid., 231.
15. Ibid., 22931.
16. I have found a number of useful essays in Individualism and Commitment in
American Life (previous attribution). The collection provides historical and varied
views on the role of individuals and groups in American society.
17. Arundhati Roy, Ahimsa, in War Talk (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003), 915;
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in Individualism and
Commitment in American Life, 30419; Jared M. Diamond, Necessitys Mother,
in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton,
1997), 24150; Hanno H. J. Ehses, Representing Macbeth in Victor Margolin, ed.,
Design Discourse: History Theory Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 18797.
18. Warren I. Susman, The Peoples Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer
Society in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 21129; William Leach, Sell
Them Their Dreams in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New
American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 298302; Martin Luther King,
Jr., I Have a Dream (Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963), in Martin Luther King, Jr.:
The Peaceful Warrior (New York: Pocket Books, 1968).
19. Maud Lavin and Shayla Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Lavin, ed., The
Business of Holidays (New York: Monacelli, 2004), 3035.
20. Victor Margolin, Introduction, and Chapter 1, Visions of the Future: Rodchenko
and Lissitzky 19171921, in The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko Lissitzky Moholy-Nagy
19171946 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 143.
21. Tyler, Shaping Belief.
chapter 24
In Between: Challenging the

Role of Graphic Design by
Situating It in a Collaborative,
Interdisciplinary Class
ANN MCDONALD
So dont just teach interactive design; design interactive education!

max bruinsma
Both graphic design education and professional practice is in a state of

ux. A maturing eld, rapid changes in technologies, and an increasingly
global marketplace have led to further specialization and liaisons with
allied disciplines. Undergraduate graphic design programs, especially
those situated in universities, have made moves to incorporate new
technologies and balance the integration of liberal arts coursework and
practice-based knowledge. At the same time, design educators are
increasingly looking to related elds to build research and graduate
education methodologies.1
Jessica Helfand denes graphic design for the AIGA as:
complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and
charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed,
demands the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful
individual who can orchestrate these elements so they all add
up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising,
or subversive or somehow memorable.2
This denition of design practice, however, is not viable when engaging
354
in the conception and execution of large-scale interactive projects. In
many professional settings, and increasingly in educational settings,
the thoughtful individual is being replaced by a team or group steeped
in knowledge about, or perhaps in collaboration with, the end users of
the designed system or artifact.
The AIGA Experience Design Community, formed in 2000, dened
their mission as building an interdisciplinary community of professionals
who design for a world in which experiences are increasingly digital and
connected.3 But it has evolved to address a broader denition of design,
focused on relationships and experience rather than an explicitly digital
focus.4 Meredith Davis, in a curricular statement for AIGA experience
design, claried this position by questioning design educations emphasis
on objects and designers and calling for an emphasis on audiences and
their experiences.5
In many university curriculums, graphic design education is a
maximized undergraduate course of study, attempting to meet the
needs of a professional practice and establish a research and cultural
discourse. In a 2004 article, Steven Heller called for a ve-year graphic
design program in response to an overburdened curriculum short on
typography, requisite technologies, and liberal arts.6 Given these pressures,
it has been digcult to determine whether or how undergraduate graphic
design curriculum should change to incorporate the expanded
boundaries suggested by experience design. Many programs have added
time-based design and interactive or web design classes within graphic
design programs, but these classes often do not adequately address the
collaborative, boundary-crossing nature of experience design.
This case study reviews the premise, process, and results of a
co-taught, two-term undergraduate course at Northeastern University
in 2003/2004structured with emphasis on research, interdisciplinary
collaboration, socially focused content, and the realization of a fully
functional interactive screen-based projectto determine the risks and
benets of this type of class within graphic design curricula.
trace
Graphic design students role in this class were most closely aligned with
conclusions by Max Bruinsma in his article Design Interactive Education.
Bruinsma explores the graphic designers role as a dichotomy between
355
conceptual and formal design, noting that in multimedia the emphasis is
shifting from visualizing toward conceptualizing:
This implies in eKect a division into two aspects of graphic
designers activities: on the one hand there are specialists,
the conceivers and (technical) realizers of presentations, the
imagers; on the other hand there are the generalists, the
conceivers and managers of conceptual consistency. . . .
Their main asset is the argumented vision, not so much
the visualisation. They formulate the concepts and map the
contexts.7
The class was structured as a collaboration between twelve
undergraduate students and two faculty members. Each of the students
were dual majors in multimedia studies, with primary majors in music
technology, animation, and graphic design; some students also had
programming and photography minors. The course was structured for
student collaboration and realization of a fully functional interactive
screen-based project. Extensive research and scriptwriting engaged the
group in a collective project, inspired by their concerns with the hastily
passed Patriot Act. They created an interactive narrative to compel their
peers to examine their opinions and feelings about surveillance,
individual freedom, trust, and media reliability.
The resulting project, titled Trace, is an immersive visual and sonic
environment, operating in the overlap between narrative, interactivity,
and gaming. Trace is set in a ctional city on election day, where a
proposition to expand a surveillance program is put to a vote.
Information is relayed through newspaper articles, radio reports, and
video triggered by artifacts in the various streets and buildings of the
city. The user, taking the role of a citizen (who is surveilled throughout
the day), is asked to uncover information about various city residents
experiences and then vote for or against the referendum to expand the
surveillance program statewide.
The students participated in a collectivity that went beyond
visualization to a less immediately apparent realization of potential
relationships and systems. Their focus on critical questioning, the ability
to make structure visible, and implementation of visual and behavioral
hierarchies were indispensable skills in the successful realization of such
an ambitious student project.

technology and new media programs
Distinct disciplines and departments are the traditional organizational
method of universities. Many strategies have been used to blur and
break these boundaries. Students entering universities (as well as the
business world) see their choices and career paths in a more uid manner
than institutional boundaries and department names suggest. In the
last decade, universities have seen a marked increase in double majors
and dual majors, a combining of two disciplines in a hybrid mix.8 The
multimedia studies dual major at Northeastern University was created
and funded to leverage the creative potential of new digital technologies
and to break institutional and departmental barriers that are counter to
undergraduate interdisciplinary collaboration.
Interactive multimedia is inherently complex; by denition it crosses
several media and curriculum boundaries. Given the constraints of
structured curriculum and departments, multiple models for integrating
this emerging eld into design education have been employed by various
graduate and undergraduate programs. Brian Stone, writing for the
AIGA on the blurring of these boundaries, notes that a number of
graduate programs have incorporated human factors, user testing, and
industrial design,9 while other programs situated more in the arts have
combined music, theater, video arts, installation, and 3-D animation.
Graphic design educators and administratorsespecially those located
within art departmentshave struggled to dene and grapple with digital
media. The AIGA design education listserve has had recent discussions by
educators trying to negotiate the territory between graphic design and
digital media.10 The parallel track for undergraduate new media or
multimedia programs has duplicated some media classes oKered in
graphic design curriculums, but often without the typographic, systematic
foundation of graphic design programs. These new programs often cover
ground between art and design, as digital artists are hired to teach or run
programs. Lack of a clear, shared mission among diverse faculty in multiple
concentrations can also mean negotiation of pressures to oKer courses that
are focused around a particular technology. Courses that are exclusively
software tutorials are especially problematic, as a technology and production
focus can easily outweigh much needed design and conceptual studies.
As Meredith Davis noted as part of an AIGA design education
listserve discussion, designing experiences that include relationships
MCDONALD: IN BETWEEN 357

among audiences, contexts, and technology are not likely to be the
typical work of ne arts.11 Given the unclear territory between disciplines,
the course objectives for a class that results in a project such as Trace
need to be carefully negotiated between co-teachers and program
directors as well as clearly communicated to students.
liberal arts versus prac tice oriented goals

Many mid- to upper-level undergraduate graphic design classes are
taught using a project-based methodology.12 This approach mimicks the
process of professional design projects, beginning with audience
denition and a project brief. Typically there is a guided iterative
process, beginning with research and preliminary design.
The liberal arts and writing component of a university education is
typically situated in non-studio courses and other departments.
Implemented university-wide beginning in the 1970s, the Writing Across
the Curriculum movement concluded that critical thinking and writing
skills are best developed within a students major area of study rather
than taught as separate distinct skills.13 Writing and understanding are
developed through investigative learning. Our attempt to emphasize
conceptual and critical thinking by further binding practice and liberal
arts education components is supported by research on situated
learning, a theory of knowledge acquisition which encourages cognition
through social interaction, collaboration, and authentic context.14
design for social responsibilit y

In designing the course, we were concerned that the students have a
focused, meaningful topic that would engage them and allow them
ownership. It was important to the process that overarching topic, intent,
and audience be determined either prior to the rst class or shortly
thereafter. We encouraged a topic with social relevance that would allow
collective authorship. Brenda Laurel, in her Reclaiming Media presentation
at the AIGA national conference, Voice 2002, described goals for the
graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design which
are in line with our thinking: We want them to nd their own voices as
designers, and socially positive materials engage their emotions and
their passion.15 In structuring this class, we believed this approach was
also relevant for senior-level undergraduates.

Knowing that a pre-assigned topic would accelerate project timing,
but at the risk of a lower ownership quotient, we began discussions by
asking students to identify issues that concerned them or disturbed
them. Once they listed the fear and anxiety they felt about being near
graduation without a clear sense of their job options, they went on to list
contemporary issues such as blind acceptance of some social and
political changes wrought by responses to the September 11th attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The collective process of selecting an overarching topic fostered
considerable class investment in the choice of a timely, relevant issue. This
project ran one year prior to a presidential election and in a time when
the consequences of the hastily passed and minimally debated Patriot Act
were being interpreted. Concerns for civil liberties, increased surveillance,
and racial proling were the determined territory of investigation.
Denition and consideration of audience were required as part of
the assignment. The class decided to take on the challenge of getting
subjects aged eighteen to twenty-four to explore their feelings about
surveillance, individual freedom, trust, and media reliability. The
students researched these subjects in the days news and in other
sources. Through research they began to understand in greater depth
ways in which technology allowed convenience and sometimes an
increased sense of security, but also the ways in which the misuse of
information that exists as a result of transations with others can lead to
unwanted intrusions by commercial and governmental interests.
The additional requirement that the class collectively realize a fully
functional interactive screen-based project added the pressures of
production and implementation. The ability to balance time spent
planning and conceptualizing versus time spent executing and realizing
is a valuable real-world skill that a project of this nature brought to the
fore. However, the risk that process, exploration, experimentation, and
failure would be rushed in order to meet a production schedule was
somewhat alleviated by the two-term structure of the course.
interdisciplinary collaboration and complexit y

If one aspires to large or complex work, collaboration is typically required.
Ideally, all members of the group share knowledge and work together to
make something that is collectively richer or more expansive than one

individual could easily achieve. Many researchers in the sciences stress
the importance of collaboration, noting that the creative energy of
others can support and motivate, and that the challenge of a variety
of perspectives and approaches can lead to new directions.16
Interdisciplinary teams in university research settings often bring
together the sciences and liberal arts disciplines or multiple design
specialties. As both an educator and design consultant, Terry Irwin
points to the skills learned through interdisciplinary collaboration,
noting that within highly specialized areas of study, students are not
given projects that encourage the development of interpersonal/
interdisciplinary skills. These types of skills can only be learned in
collaborative situations with other people whose concerns are diKerent
(yet complementary) from ones own.17
In this case the disciplines joined by the multimedia studies dual
major can all be grouped under the creative arts umbrella. While Irwin is
referring to the creation of interdisciplinary teams from a wide range of
disparate areas of study, some of the same gains were realized even in
teams of closely allied disciplines as in the creation of Trace. The common
theme to all three disciplines reected in the students respective primary
majorsmusic technology, animation, and graphic designis that they
all express ideas temporally. The inherent time-based and structures
approach required of music technology students in composition was a
readily applicable perspective when faced with the demands of planning
a complex interactive project.18
The value of collaboration in education has a long history. There is
much literature nding that students are capable of performing at higher
intellectual levels when working collaboratively rather than individually.
The diversity of knowledge and ability to collectively synthesize and
evaluate information are improved.19 Setting a class goal that demanded
considerable creative collaboration motivated the students to resolve
conicts among themselves as their nal project was dependent on each
person contributing signicantly. In the creation of Trace, collaborative
authorship and group decision-making necessitated that design become
a social practice.
fostering the process: co-teaching

In this case, the ability to manage the complexity of multiple disciplines

within the classroom was helped immensely by having individuals with
diKerent backgrounds co-teach the course. As it was unrealistic to
expect that instructors can cover all disciplines represented in the
classroom, additional outside experts were brought in to advise on areas
in which co-teachers needed support, and were also called upon for
content and design evaluation several times throughout the year. There
is a risk in bringing together multiple disciplines for a collective project if
none of the instructors have experience in key areassuch as writing,
project management, and programming skillsneeded to successfully
complete an ambitious project such as an interactive narrative. Key
faculty who possess these skills and can teach them in a project-based
setting were critical to the courses success.
The collaborative process is demanding for instructors as well as
students. Communication and trust between instructors helps in
collectively determining shared goals for learning outcome. There is also
a need for a balance of goals set by instructors versus goals arrived at
through group consensus. The instructors must act as facilitators of an
undened collective visionthey must steer, rather than lead.
In this class, the ability to focus that vision through constant
attendance to the synthesis of multiple perspectives and adjustment of
goals and assignments was crucial. Individuals who were not performing
could not be red and had to be brought back into the fold with a renewed
sense of ownership, involvement, or a revised area of contribution.
There was a constant need to bring issues to the surface so they could
be articulated, visualized, and acted upon or resolved.
interac tive narrative as form

One method for determining form is to evaluate the audiences needs
and project goals and choose the medium(s) which will best meet the
stated goals. But with this course, situated at an undergraduate level
in a multimedia studies program, we chose to prescribe a digital form
and then facilitate the problem and content development from that
point forward.
Brenda Laurel, in her article Creating Core Content in a Post-
Convergence World, prescribes a number of guidelines in her laws of
core content creation. Two of these laws are to create environments
and devise foundational narratives.20 The class chose to enact these

laws as a method to give users the incentives they need to grapple with
the complexity of the chosen topic.
Picking up on the commonality of temporal communication within
the group, we set forth a challenge for the students that would hopefully
defy easy categorization as a graphic design, animation, programming,
or sound design problem. Students were assigned the task of collectively
creating an interactive narrative. They were to assume that the form of
interactivity would be screen-based mouse-and-keyboard interaction for
delivery of content until they had reason to choose another delivery
method. Though we acknowledge that locking in these variables prior to
understanding the problem at hand limited conceptual thinking, it also
made it possible for an undergraduate collective with diverse views to
focus their energies.
While the challenge of producing an interactive narrative proved
sugciently open-ended to invite equal contributions from students in
each of the concentrations, merging these contributions into a cohesive
story and structure proved digcult. It was assumed that the intended
audience, aged eighteen to twenty-four, might not have the Patriot Act,
privacy issues, or voting on their radar, but ideally through engagement
with an interactive narrative they could be compelled to consider the
crucial role these issues may play in their lives.
Students began by trying to dene interactive narrative in relation
to this project and reviewed what we termed alternative narratives in
various mediums. They explored how an interactive construct can
successfully adopt a narrative form. Many authors have pointed to the
incompatibility of narrative and interactivity due to the fact that
narrative is inherently linear, whereas interactivity assumes a choice on
the part of the user, which takes some control away from the master
narrative.21 Interactivity promises freedom and choice, but actually
conceals the limited choices prescribed by the designer.
After looking at multiple examples of narrative and interactive
work, the students initial responses regarding the project goals were
diverse. They wanted to create something abstract and beautiful, maybe
with nontraditional characters; to make something original that would
take advantage of their creative expressiveness. A more critical goal was
to create something non-didactic but engaging enough to make people
think and create a connection to the real world on ethical issues.

Collectively we established the following content and behavioral criteria:
the nal piece must contain a narrative and not just be a random
exploration; the narrative can be loose, but the user must feel that he or
she is experiencing some kind of progression; the user must feel as if he
or she has some sort of control over the narrative ow, whether it is
controlling the characters, pacing, branching, or ordering of the story;
and most importantly, the nal product must be an experience that
people want to have.
Initial narrative development forced all of the students to explore
beyond their disciplinary boundaries, as none were creative writing
majors. Conclusions resulting in murder and ensuing intrigue continued
to surface despite discussions on the inuence of television and video
games. We continued to use the larger social issue of privacy and
surveillance to help us grapple with the problems of collective authorship.
After a few weeks of small groups with divergent proposals, it was
agreed that studying classic narratives would be a fruitful approach.
Because divergent opinions on potential stories seemed insurmountable,
the premise of Robin Hood was chosen and repurposed in a contemporary
urban setting. The theme of scrucked over characters was resonant with
both the Robin Hood myth and troubling surveillance and privacy issues.
interac tive narrative or game?

Once theme and narrative structure were determined, the question of
audience motivation resurfaced. What would motivate users to interact
and explore the piece? Through various visual proposals, discussions,
and class consensus, the project was initially dened by what it wasnt to
be: a game that needed winning or a text-based information interface. It
was envisioned that the nature of the interactive exploration would
force users to engage in problem solving that one encounters in game
play. A determining adjective for the look and feel based on topic and
intended audience was edgy.
We evaluated methodologies used in games, such as sequenced
event searches that lead to a cumulative event, time- or point-based
challenges, and clue retrieval. We also revisited the power of narrative to
propel the user to further search for follow-up stories.
It was decided that Trace would be an immersive environment,
depicting streets and building sites in the ctional city of Falls Point on

Election Day. The user is free to navigate from one stylized photographic
space to another. To enter the interface you need to register to vote,
much like new software requires registration. Each user is given an
identication number and is surveilled in the meta-layer of the city. This
meta-layer contains time and map location and data of the users progress
through the city. The meta-layer is triggered as an overlay from any clock
or security camera in the city environs.
Time plays a vital role in leading the user to uncover new information,
locations, and interactions. The user explores Falls Point beginning at
8:00 am at the caf, and ending at the voting booth no later than 8:00
pm. Time advances whenever the user enters a location or interacts with
characters or objects. Interactions and information appear at specic
times throughout the day in order to help the user along his path.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Trace is that certain events
happen at specic times, whether or not the user is present to witness
them. However, these events are referenced at multiple places and times
from diKerent points of view, so the users experience of Trace varies
with each unique path through the city.
The sound in the project is designed to create both a mood and the
illusion of a real-world environment. The border between sound design
and musical score is blurred. Layered soundtracks create a virtual
soundscape giving perceived depth to the two-dimensional images. As
virtual events and time pass, sound alerts the user to oKscreen events.
The majority of the narrative regarding various citizens individual
stories and Proposition 9the initiative deciding the statewide
expansion or discontinuance of SafetyNets surveillance programis
gleaned from aural radio reports or video snippets triggered by select
objects in the environs. The user is moved through the narrative via
dialogue and audible cues. The radio news reports track opinion survey
results on the initiative. The environs also display ads customized to your
initial registration form answers. There are numerous newspaper articles
on tables and walls that enlarge when selected. These are a mix of actual
stories from The New York Times and other papers and ctional reports
about Falls Point residents. The coKee shop barista, the librarian, and
other photographic characters engage the user with their opinions about
Proposition 9. There are also subplots about scrucked over characters,
which can be uncovered through various ogce papers and computer les

the user can gain access to once certain paths have been completed or
enough time has elapsed. There are numerous bus shelters where
SafetyNet and opposition groups have posted ads trying to sway public
opinion. The students took care to give equal play to both sides of the
issue. Users are free to vote yes or no on Proposition 9 once they have
spent adequate time in the city uncovering material. A follow-up video
then delivers a synopsis of the near future in Falls Point from the
opposite perspective.
process
Students worked in constantly reforming teams with cycles of
collaboration and independent development. When lacking needed
disciplines as a part of a student team, we attempted to draw those
resources from within students who had interest or abilities. The obvious
division between sound and visual strengths of students based on their
majors was crossed numerous times. There was a concerted eKort to
recognize individual limitations, being aware not to categorize students
by disciplinary labels. We evolved protocols for working together,
maintaining attention to individuals, to the process, to the overall
project outcome, and to larger educational goals. Keeping these goals in
mind helped resolve conicting personalities and ideas. All members of
the class learned to trust others.
We approached each class juncture as an opportunity to revisit
assumptions and look forward, only looking back to learn from any
missteps. Students learned the resilience needed to stay involved, so
that even when their individual ideas were discarded by the group, they
were able to remain invested in the collective goal. They gained a
realization that design is an interactive, nonlinear process, and that their
ideas were more readily considered by the group if they were specic
and clearly presented. Collective decisions seemed eKortless at critical
times because most agreed that one of the directions put forth more
clearly answered the criteria required, and enough of the students could
visualize the next steps of the chosen direction.
Communication was an important part of the process. In order to
facilitate the kind of open dialogue needed, we helped students realize
that they could be excellent critics of each others work even if the work
being critiqued was outside their strength as makers. Indeed, sometimes

they were better critics of that work, as they were less invested in
preconceptions about the discipline. We also used discussion forums,
instant messaging, and email, and when necessary added extra class
meetings. Group leaders were assigned to manage small group meetings
outside of class time, and a pin-up space in the lab was dedicated for
aiding the ongoing visualization of the project structure. Finally, posting
deadlines were often the day prior to class so instructors could meet in
advance to determine their response and subsequent week assignments.
The graphic design students in the class had the opportunity to act
as photographers, project managers, writers/editors, and programmers,
in addition to the role dictated by their major. One instructors strengths
in writing and programming gave students a resource for focused
learning, while the other instructors emphasis on systems development
and research/information integration was more in line with the role a
graphic designer might play on a real team in actual practice. Additionally,
Northeastern University has a well-established co-op education
program, which meant that most students had already held at least one
six-month position in a related eld in the year prior to the class. Some
students intern or co-op experiences gave them the abilities necessary
to see value and creativity in project management roles.
conclusions
In Trace, graphic design became almost invisible in many traditional
ways, as experiential and sound devices were used for primary
dissemination of information instead of textual methods. The graphic
designers in the class gained in conceptual and collaborative skills by
stepping outside their eld. The trade-oK or risk was a lack of greater
depth in their primary eld, especially information design classes they
had to forego in order to become part of the collective.
Traditional graphic design artifacts found within the Trace interface
include: SafetyNet corporate identity, bus shelter posters, tracking screens,
website, and individual data les; instant messaging screens; newspaper
articles; objects, billboards, and other signage in the environment; and type
in the motion video portraits. On a meta level, the Trace interface included a
voter registration form (equivalent to software initialization form), an
online voting form, surveillance tracking (individual player location tracking
and elapsed time spent playing the game), and a 3D map locator.

In hindsight, the students would have beneted from more explicit
discussions about the role of graphic design as the course proceeded. If
we had been more conscious of exploring evocative design approaches
for these artifacts instead of mimicking existing design standards, some
of the students might have more quickly become the imagers within the
vision set forth by the generalists. The students and the Trace project
would have beneted from increased use of formal design skills as a
method of questioning. Trace may not have achieved all of its political,
narrative, and game play goals, but it provided an opportunity for graphic
design students to explore a broad range of interactive and information
design problems.
In the end, it was possible for two instructors to guide a group of
highly motivated interdisciplinary students toward a collective work,
mandate that the topic be socially relevant, require a research component
that incorporates the liberal arts mission of the university, and embrace
the potential of technology. The varied strengths of students from
diKerent majors allowed the nal piece to be richer, especially aurally,
than it would have been in an exclusively art or design class. The
experience of being part of the collective creation of a message delivered
with careful consideration of the medium and audience provided the
graphic design students a valuable education that made up for the loss of
traditional graphic design classes. The additional time investment required
by both faculty and students to successfully complete a project of this
nature was oKset by a process and end result that engaged all participants
in the realization that design has an important role to play in educating
and encouraging an audience about a digcult yet important topic.
All course content developed in collaboration with Jay Laird, co-instructor.

notes
Epigraph: Max Bruinsma Design Interactive Education, in Steven Heller, ed., The
Education of a Graphic Designer (New York: Allworth Press, 1998), 62.
1. See Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, ed., Visible Language 38, no. 2, Special Issue,
Collaboration, User Studies, Design Methods, Design Research.
2. Jessica Helfand, What is Graphic Design?, http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/
whatisgraphicdesign (last accessed July 20, 2005).
3. AIGA experience design mission statement, http://www.aiga.org/
content.cfm?contentalias=whyjoin (last accessed July 20, 2005).
4. AIGA what is experience design, http://www.aiga.org/
content.cfm?contentalias=what_is_aiga.ed (last accessed July 20, 2005).
5. Meredith Davis, A Curriculum Statement: Designing Experiences, Not Objects,
in LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education 1 (November 2000).
http://loop1.aiga.org/content.cfm?Alias=curriculum0001 (last accessed July 20, 2005).
6. Steven Heller, What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Year Design Program,
Voice: AIGA Journal of Design and Design Education (April 7, 2004),
http://www.journal.aiga.org/content.cfm?contentalias=_getfullarticle&aid=345114
(last accessed 20 July 2005).
7. Bruinsma, Design Interactive Education, 60.
8. Steven J. Teper, The Creative Campus: Whos No. 1, The Chronicle of Higher
Education (October 1, 2004). http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i06/06b00601.htm
(last accessed July 20, 2005).
9. R. Brian Stone, Blurring Boundaries: Interactive Multimedia and Interdisciplinary
Convergence, in AIGA Design Education (November 14, 2004).
http://designforum.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=%5Fgetfullarticle&aid=
%23%2F%5E%23%24%0A (last accessed July 20, 2005).
10. Randall Hoyt, email to AIGA Design Education listserve, March 22, 2005,
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/aiga_education/message/894; and Jan
Conradi, email to AIGA Design Education listserve, March 23, 2005,
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/aiga_education/message/895 (last accessed
July 20, 2005).
11. Meredith Davis, email to AIGA Design Education listserve, March 27, 2005,
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/aiga_education/message/899 (last accessed
July 20, 2005).
12. Steven Heller, ed., Teaching Graphic Design: Course OKerings and Class Projects from
The Leading Undergraduate and Graduate Programs (New York: Allworth Press, 2003).
13. David R. Russell, The Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement, in Writing in the
Academic Disciplines, 18701990 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991), 271.
14. John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, Situated Cognition and the
Culture of Learning, Educational Researcher 18, no. 1 (Jan.Feb., 1989): 3242; the
Cognition And Technology Group at Vanderbilt, Anchored Instruction and Its
Relationship to Situated Cognition, Educational Researcher 19, no. 6 (Aug.Sept.,
1990): 210.

15. Brenda Laurel, Value, Voice and Culture Work in These Weird Times, Voice: AIGA
National Design Conference, March 23, 2002 http://voiceconference.aiga.org/
transcripts/presentations/laurel_presentation.pdf (last accessed July 20, 2005).
16. Anuradha A. Gokhale, Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking, Journal
of Technology Education 7, no. 1 (Fall 1995).
17. Terry Irwin, Specialization and Design, Voice: AIGA Journal of Design and Design
Education (February 17, 2004), http://journal.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=
_getfullarticle&aid=333114 (last accessed July 20, 2005).
18. Pamela Burnard and Betty Anne Younker, Problem Solving and Creativity:
Insights from Students Individual Composing Pathways, International Journal of
Music Education 22, no. 1 (2004): 5976.
19. Bruner J. Vygotsky, An Historical and Conceptual Perspective: Culture,
Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 2134; quoted in Gokhale, Collaborative Learning
Enhances Critical Thinking, 28.
20. Brenda Laurel, Creating Core Content in a Post-Convergence World: Licensed to
Death, AIGA Collision! April 14, 2000, New York City. http://www.tauzero.com/
Brenda_Laurel/Recent_Talks/ContentPostConvergence.html (last accessed
July 20, 2005).
21. Andy Cameron, Interactivities Dissimulations, Millenium Film Journal 28
(Spring 1995).

Section V
FURTHER READING
annotated bibliographies of the former
graphic design education association
Introduction
MEREDITH DAVIS
This collection of design research bibliographies, originally published in 1997, are a part
of the oeuvre of the former Graphic Design Education Association and the American
Center for Design. Made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts,
these bibliographies include books from the design elds and from other disciplines
that shape thinking in design practice and education. The intent in dening an ambitious
reading program is to signal the relevance of such information to an evolving profession
and to support emerging design research. In compiling the bibliographies, I went to
individuals who represent professional design ogces and schools that are recognized
for their strength in the respective topics of the bibliographies. All bibliographers
have professional careers and/or teach at the graduate level. Rather than collect a
variety of opinions regarding relevant books on each issue, we used the bibliographies
as a way of dening individual viewpoints on the topics. For education readers, therefore,
the relationship between a schools reputation for teaching a particular perspective on
design and the resources it recommends to its graduate students is apparent. Likewise,
the references that shape thinking in a well-respected professional ogce are also
understood. It is my hope that these publications will inspire designers to explore new
perspectives on their profession and will encourage graduate students to move beyond
the well-worn design case studies that comprise so much of the literature in our eld.
372
Cultural Studies Bibliography
ANDREW BLAUVELT
This bibliography brings together books that speak to the multidisciplinary nature of
contemporary cultural studies. It is designed to introduce readers to a range of diverse
topics that are considered relevant to the cultural study of graphic design and to
provide a range of methodological approaches and theoretical strategies. Entries are
organized under six categories: art history, theory, and criticism; consumption studies;
identity politics and cultural representation; media studies and technology; philosophy
and history; and semiotics and literary criticism. Texts were selected from outside the
design disciplines to broaden and inform the scope of ideas.
art history, theory, and criticism
Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin, 1972.

Berger oKers an important and accessible Marxist analysis of the relationship between
Western painting and the ideology of advertising.
Berger, Maurice. How Art Becomes History. New York: Icon Editions, Harper
Collins, 1992.
Berger examines American art and culture in postNew Deal society, from the work of
the Farm Security Administration photographers in the 1930s to the work on race by
contemporary artist Adrian Piper. Berger provides an analysis of social-political events
through representations drawn from art practice and popular culture.
373
Bolton, Richard, ed. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
This collection of important essays on photographic theory, history, and practice by,
among others, Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, Catherine Lord, Alan Sekula, and
Rosalind Krauss are grouped into four sections dealing with the aesthetic practice of
photography, the construction of sexual diKerence, promotion of nationalism and class
distinctions, and the politics of photographic truth.
Brger, Paul. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1984.
Brger develops his theory of the avant-garde as operating institutionally within the
culture, and how this position marks a decided departure from previous periods and
programs such as Romanticism and high modernism.
Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986.
A collection of essays by the noted theorist and artist which attempts to place visual art
in the sphere of cultural theory and activity rather than traditional art history by
rejecting the major themes and tenets of modernist art criticism.
Cooke, Lynne, and Peter Wollen, eds. Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances.
Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
The tenth installment from the Dia Center for the Arts Discussions in Contemporary
Culture includes thirteen wide-ranging essays on topics of visual culture. The premise
of the collection is to reexamine the role of visual display on the part of cultural producers.
Included among the essays are Susan Buck-Morsss Envisioning Capital, which looks at
the role of information display in political economy; Scott Bukatmans essay on special
eKects and the sublime, The Articial Innite; Ann Reynoldss Visual Stories, which
considers the dioramas of the natural history museum; and Edward Balls too brief
introduction to the performative dimension of ethnicity, Constructing Ethnicity.
Crimp, Douglas. On the Museums Ruins. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT
Press, 1993.
As the title suggests, Crimp examines the role of the museum, viewer, curator, and
artist in the wake of postmodernism with chapters devoted to The Art of Exhibition
and The Postmodern Museum. Special attention is paid to the role of photography in
many essays, with text supplemented by photographs by artist Louise Lawler, who
documents the works of art in private collections, public holdings, museum archives,
and art auctions.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Chicago and London: University of

Derrida undertakes a deconstruction of the concept of the parergone.g., the frame of
374 DESIGN STUDIES: FURTHER READING

a painting, clothing on statuary, or support columns for a buildingin Kants Critique of
Judgment. The parergon is understood as a supplement to the work, as an un/necessary
element which becomes self-eKacing at the moment it functions.
Fernie, Eric, ed. Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. London:
Phaidon, 1995.
A comprehensive collection of major essays by many of art historys leading
practitioners. Each essay is accompanied by an introduction, and a useful glossary of art
historical concepts is included. The essays span the art of antiquity to contemporary
practice and include pieces by William Morris, Heinrich Wlhin, Roger Fry, Alfred H.
Barr, Nikolaus Pevsner, T. J. Clark, and Griselda Pollock.
Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay
Press, 1983.
An important collection of essays by Jrgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind
Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard,
and Edward Said. The range of topics covered by the essayists outline the major tenets
of postmodernism across many disciplines.
. Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1985.

These ten essays by the noted critic of contemporary art and culture oKer a discussion
on topics such as pluralism, historicism, pastiche, spectacle, and cultural politics, with
specic reference to contemporary art practice.
. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996.
Foster ponders the role of the avant-garde at the end of the century by asking, in the
lead essay, Whos Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde? and, in the concluding chapter,
What Ever Happened to Postmodernism? In between, Foster looks critically at 1960s
minimalism, the text-based art of the 1970s, and the simulation-art of the 1980s, as well
as what he describes as a return to real bodies and social sites with the practices of
The Artist as Ethnographer in 1990s.
, ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.

Foster collects essays by Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, Norman Bryson,
and Jacqueline Rose on the dominance of the sense of sight in the formation of the
philosophies of modernism. Included among the essays are discussions on ocularcentrism,
perspectivalism, and the role of the gaze in Eastern and Western cultures.
Jameson, Fredric. Postermodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Jameson addresses the role of utopian theory and historical narrative in postmodern
culture, exploring the conditions of postmodernism as a manifestation of global economic
systems through examples drawn from areas such as architecture, art, and lm.
B L A U V E LT: C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S B I B L I O G R A P H Y 375
Jencks, Charles, ed. The Post-Modern Reader. London: Academy Editions, 1992.
This collection of many inuential essays by one of the founding theorists of
postmodernism in architecture examines postmodernism across various disciplines
including art, architecture, literature, and lm, with sections devoted to the new
political geography, feminism, and the divisions and distinctions between science and
religion and late modernism and postmodernism.
Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
This collection of ten essays by the prominent art historian traces the development of
using semiotic and poststructuralist techniques to view a work of art, thereby
undermining many of the assumptions surrounding conventional art history. The essays
oKer a critique of modernism through a reassessment of the role of the authenticity
and originality surrounding the avant-garde. Of particular interest to designers is the
essay on the grid as a symbol of modernism.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1986.
Mitchell explores the territory between the word and the image by reexamining the
work of major writers on the subject, including Goodman, Gombrich, Lessing, and
Burke, with particular emphasis on the ideological dimensions of these varied approaches.
Nelson, Robert S., and Richard ShiK, eds. Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Twenty-two wide-ranging concepts are elucidated by diKerent scholars using examples
from art history to make their arguments. Among the concepts are those entering the
recent debates in art historical practice, such as Representation, Simulacrum, Word
and Image, Meaning/Interpretation, Originality, Appropriation, Avant-Garde,
Fetish, Gaze, Commodity, and Postmodernism/Postcolonialism.
Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture. Ed. Scott
Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992.
A collection of excellent essays by Owens, a noted art critic, divided into four sections:
Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Sexuality and Power, Culture, and Pedagogy.
Owens oKers a complex analysis of leading contemporary art practitioners, drawing
heavily on aspects of critical and social theory. Also included are extensive
bibliographies on art criticism, political economy, and AIDS.
Rees, A. L., and Frances Borzello, eds. The New Art History. Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988.
An encapsulation of the major inroads made into the discipline of art history in the last
few decades by feminist, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic

discourses, including essays by Stephen Bann, Jon Bird, Margaret Iversen, and Victor
Burgin, among others.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History,

Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Solomon-Godeau, a photography critic and historian, has assembled some of her most
important essays, grouped into four sections: the politics of aestheticism in photographic
history, the role of artist and photographer in postmodern culture, the redenition of
the role of documentary photography, and the construction of sexual diKerence.
Sparke, Penny. An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century.

New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
One of the rst histories of design to focus on the cultural context of objects. Sparke
examines the development of modern design and its relationship with the State,
technology, capitalism and mass production, and the social environment. The text, which
concentrates on industrial design, is divided chronologically but developed thematically.
Squiers, Carol, ed. The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography.

Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
This collection of essays explores the cultural construction of contemporary photography.
Included among the essayists are some of the leading critics and theorists of photography,
including Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Rosalyn Deutsche, Victor Burgin,
and Simon Watney. Of particular note to designers is Kathy Myers essay, Selling
Green, on the use of ecological issues and concerns in recent advertising campaigns.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
A group of essays by the noted art historian on the use of photography as a method for
social control. Tagg continues the initial work of Michel Foucault, locating another
history of photographic practice.
. Grounds of Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

This collection of essays includes several about the practice of art history, including The
Pachucos Flayed Hide, written with Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, which reexamines
the identity politics surrounding Mexican-American youth and the zoot suit.
Wallis, Brian, ed. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Boston:

David R. Godine, 1984.
A major collection gathers essays from a wide variety of sources on the subject of
postmodernism and the crisis of representation. Included are a critique of modernism,
an analysis of contemporary culture, and a discussion of the themes found in
postmodernism. Among the essayists are Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin
Buchloh, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Martha Rosler,
and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
WolK, Janet. Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993.
Addressing the limitations of aesthetics (essentialism) and sociology (reductionism) in
the analysis of art practice, WolK argues for the best of both worlds. By drawing upon
theorists such as Kant, Althusser, Marcuse, and Bourdieu, WolK expounds on the
diKerences between aesthetic philosophy and sociology, and the role of the aesthetic
and the political in art before proposing a sociological aesthetics.
. The Social Production of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
WolK grapples with the role of readers/viewers, the nature of authorship and creativity,
the ideological dimension of art, aesthetic autonomy, and the cultural politics of art.
Among the chapters are Interpretation as Re-creation and The Death of the Author,
which provide a useful mapping of the debates on the role of authorship and readership
in contemporary cultural production.
consumption studies and material culture studies
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Volume I. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Batailles concept of the accursed share, the expenditure of excess energy in any
system, is shown in examples ranging from Aztec sacrice and Northwest Indian
potlatch to Tibetan monastic culture. Batailles theory of general economy challenges
conventional models of scarcity and utility.
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1988.
An excellent selection of essays by one of the more controversial gures of the French
post-structuralist group. Poster covers Baudrillards writings from 1968 to 1985 and
includes English translations of previously unavailable works. The essays cover
Baudrillards early thoughts on consumer culture and sign value as well as on the role of
the media in contemporary society, including his description of the simulacrum.
. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London and New York:
Verso, 1996.
The System of Objects is Baudrillards rst book, originally published in Paris in 1968. As a
cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, Baudrillard considers a variety
of topics and subjects from a base in both linguistics and Marxism. From home
furnishing and interior design and the psychology of collecting to gadgets and robots
and the implications of consumer credit and advertising, Baudrillard outlines his
classication of objects as a-functional, non-functional, and metafunctional.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans.

Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Distinction is Bourdieus exhaustive study of the French bourgeoisie, which dispels the

myth of taste as an innocent expression of judgment. In this vast ethnographic study,
Bourdieu demonstrates his concept of the habitus as the disposition of ones lifestyle
in coordination with a persons access to cultural capital, or education, which in turn
maintains the prestige and social status of the dominant classes.
Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods. London: Allen Lane, 1979.
Mary Douglas, a noted cultural anthropologist, and Baron Isherwood attempt an
anthropology of consumption, with a critique of the role of individualism in economic
theory. Douglass central thesis is the understanding that economic goods are part of a
larger cultural system in which they carry meaning and have specic social functions.
Easthope, Anthony, and Kate McGown, eds. A Critical and Cultural Theory
Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
A collection of essays, by the likes of Barthes, Saussure, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and
Cixous, are grouped in sections such as ideology, subjectivity, semiology, and gender.
These texts are made more accessible by introductions, biographies, and summaries by
the editors.
Ewen, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary

Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Ewen analyzes contemporary material culture by examining the relationship between
social control and the techniques of advertising through the politics of style.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750. London: Thames
and Hudson, 1986.
Forty analyzes consumer culture since the beginnings of industrialized production,
examining the cultural context of industrial products and arguing that the cultural
values of society are expressed through the designed object.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies.
London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
This extensive collection of forty essays is organized into sixteen subject categories,
including the history of cultural studies and issues of gender, sexuality, nationality,
ethnicity, race, colonialism, pedagogy, popular culture, and cultural institutions.
Essayists include CliKord, West, Mercer, Bhabha, Grioux, Crimp, Hall, hooks, and Gilroy,
among others. This collection represents a diverse range of topics in contemporary
cultural studies.
Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
In a collection of essays that grapple with images and objects from popular culture, from
Italian motor scooters to a Talking Heads video, Hebdige attempts to understand both the
creation and consumption of things. Included in the book is Hebdiges critique of the
emergent British style culture showcased in the 1980s lifestyle magazines The Face and i-D.
. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1979.
A fundamental text for understanding style as a form of communication and social
practice. Using the youth subcultural movements in BritainMods, Teds, and Punksas
a case study, Hebdige articulates the signifying practice of style through an analysis
combining semiotics and sociology.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New

York: Continuum, 1993.
Originally published in 1944, this text by two members of the Frankfurt School is a
major study of modern culture inuenced by their exile to America during the war
years. Included is the essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,
which considers the developments in popular culture of the period under the rubric of
false consciousness.
Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in

America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Levine begins his analysis with the closure and rigidity of cultural spaces in the
nineteenth century through the emerging hierarchy between high and low culture of
the twentieth century.
Miller, Daniel, ed. Acknowledging Consumption. London and New York:

Routledge, 1995.
A collection of essays from the growing area of consumption studies in various
academic disciplines. From an anthropology of consumption and a political economy of
consumption to a recongured geography of consumption, the psychology of the new
consumer behavior and the consumption of media, the writers make the case for the
signicance of the role of the consumer in our understanding of contemporary life.
. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford and Cambridge, MA:

Blackwell, 1987.
Miller provides a theoretical basis for the study of material culture from the standpoint
of consumption by rst tracing, through Hegel, Marx, Munn, and Simmel, the
development of the concept of objectication as a process whereby expression is given
form. Consumption is understood as a productive process whereby consumers
appropriate goods and services in order to construct identities and achieve social ideals.
Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson, eds. Rethinking Popular Culture:

Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Nineteen essayists (Habermas, Geertz, Foucault, etc.) explore a range of subjects from
varying cultures and time periods and how these activities establish social norms.

Sparke, Penny. As Long as Its Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. London: Pandora
(HarperCollins), 1995.
This design historian looks at the overlooked: domesticity, feminine consumption, home-
making, taste, etc. Through a variety of objects, from domestic appliances to furniture
to cars and interiors, Sparke examines how taste has become a gendered issue in culture,
one assigned to women, further marginalizing the study of womens material culture.
Tilley, Christopher, ed. Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics,

and Post-Structuralism. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
These essays oKer an analysis of some of the major gures of cultural interpretation,
including CliKord Geertz, Roland Barthes, and Claude Lvi-Strauss.
Urry, John. Consuming Places. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
With a concern for local culture and the diKerentiation of places in global culture, Urry
considers the role of time and space in the consumption of places and the
construction of nature and culture. In particular, he emphasizes the role of the tourist
and the promotion of tourism by the state in his sociological account.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York and London:
Penguin Books, 1994.
First published in 1899, Veblens text is considered a primary analysis of material culture
in n de sicle America. Veblen introduces the concepts of conspicuous consumption,
vicarious consumption, leisure time, and waste in a prose style akin to social satire.
Williamson, Judith. Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture.

London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1986.
Williamson explores the artifacts of popular culture and the ideological construction
of taste(s).
identit y politics and cultural representation
Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
A comprehensive collection of forty-three essays by leading scholars in the areas of
literature, gender studies, and cultural studies that provides a mapping of the diverse
terrain of lesbian and gay studies in the academy. Among the contributors: Judith
Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, John DEmilio, Stuart Hall, Gloria T. Hull, Audre Lorde, Kobena
Mercer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Simon Watney.
Berger, Maurice, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds. Construction Masculinity.
London and New York: Routeldge, 1995.
This collection of twenty-ve essays attempts a redenition of masculinity and its
relationship to science, law, media, and identity politics. Divided among ve sections,
these essays ponder What is Masculinity?, Masculinity and Representation, How
Science Denes Men, Masculinity and the Rule of Law, and Male Subjectivity and
Responsibility. A guiding theoretical principle informing the discussion is that gender
transcends mere static, social construction and is instead actively performed.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
This collection of essays continues the work of an intellectual project that seeks to
relocate Western modernity from a post-colonial perspective. Referencing a wide range
of literary works and historical events, Bhabha produces a theory for cultural hybridity
and a politics of diKerence that transcends the oppositions of East and West, and by doing
so rethinks questions of agency, identity, place, and national agliation in the process.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of the Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Butlers important text covers the complex terrain of the problems associated with
discussions of gender, sex, and desire, particularly within feminist writing and theory.
Central to Butlers arguments is the notion that the identity politics of feminism is by
nature fragmentary and exclusionary, and that a radical rethinking of representational
politics is necessary.
CliKord, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography,

Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
CliKords critical examination of ethnography in Western thought impacts on notions of
cultural collecting and incorporating the other.
CliKord, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, 1986.
The editors have assembled a series of essays that attempt to provide an overview to
the literary turn in anthropologythat is, an understanding of ethnographic research
as a writing practice whose texts are understood as texts and not merely as transparent
descriptions of lived experience. Among the oKerings are: James CliKords On
Ethnographic Allegory, George Marcuss Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in
the Modern World System, and Paul Rabinows Representations Are Social Facts.
Colomina, Beatriz, ed. Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1992.
This set of essays by an interdisciplinary group of authors explores the concept of
sexuality through both an analysis of physical space and the representation of space in

lm, television, photographs, and drawings. Among the essays are Colominas The Split
Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, Jennifer Blooms DOr, Victor Burgins Perverse Space,
and Mark Wigleys Untitled: The Housing of Gender.
Dent, Gina, ed. Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace. Seattle: Bay
Press, 1992.
This book is a documentation of a conference sponsored by the Dia Center for the Arts
focusing on the world of black cultural production and popular culture. Twenty-seven
essayists contribute to the books ve sections: Popular Culture: Theory and Criticism;
Gender, Sexuality, and Black Images in Popular Culture; The Urban Context; The
Production of Black Popular Culture; and Do the Right Thing: Postnationalism and
Essentialism. Among the contributors are Jacqueline Bobo, Angela Y. Davis, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hlla, bell hooks, and Cornel West.
Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Fabian oKers a historical examination and epistemological critique of how time is used
in anthropology to articulate positions of us and them, observer and observed, self
and other. Central to his project is the temporal condition of coevalness, in which
diKerent peoples and cultures occupy the same period of time. Written as a critique of
anthropology, Fabians inuential text has implications for historians, philosophers, and
literary critics.
Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
A major collection of essays on the subject of social marginalization of cultural groups,
with discussion of issues of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class. Among the
essayists are Cornel West, Homi K. Bhabha, Simon Watney, James CliKord, Douglas
Crimp, bell hooks, Hlne Cixous, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed. Race, Writing, and DiKerence. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1986.
These twenty essays consider the constructedness of race in works of literature, literary
theory, and criticism. Some essays explore more general issues of race and diKerence,
while others are specic readings of texts that explore cultural codes of domination.
Ginsberg, Elain K., ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke
In the wake of arguments regarding the cultural construction of identity, this collection
of essays attempts to problematize the notion of xed boundaries and categories by
exploring the concept of passing. From colonial times to the Civil War to the present
day, these essays provide specic instancessome actual, some ctionalof the ways
in which passing in racial, sexual, and national terms may help challenge the rigidity of
thought about identity politics.
hooks, bell [Gloria Watkins]. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South
End Press, 1992.
A collection of twelve essays that examine the representation of black men and women
in forms of popular culture including advertising, music, television, and lm. Included
are the essays Eating the Other, which considers white societys desire for cultural
otherness, and Whiteness in the Black Imagination, which oKers an insightful
perspective on how whiteness is viewed in black culture.
. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
hooks spatializes the concepts of social and cultural marginalization, emphasizing the
importance of understanding marginalized space not as a reservation but rather as a
site for resistance.
. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press,
1989.
Drawing upon her personal experiences, hooks considers the consequences of silence
and her own eKorts to speak out and talk back. Central to her analysis is the growing
importance of the interlocking relationships between class, race, and sex in the
construction of female identities.
. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
hooks addresses the politics of race and gender in the terrain of cultural politics
through these twenty-three short essays, cutting across a variety of practices
literature, lm, ethnography, art, poetry. Among the essays: The Politics of Radical
Black Subjectivity, Postmodern Blackness, An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and
Oppositional, Culture to Culture: Ethnography and Cultural Studies as Critical
Intervention, and Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Womens Studies.
New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1982.
This collection of essays seeks to dene the territory of African American womens
studies, addressing the systematic exclusion of women of color from the social and
cultural discourse implied in the title.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985.
Speculum of the Other Woman, by one of the major gures of feminism, serves as an
indictment of the exclusion of women from critical discourse. Irigaray traces this anti-
feminine bias through the major works of Western culture.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Kristeva explores the concept of estrangement, including the roles of foreigner, alien,

outsider, self, and other, using many historical and contemporary literary examples and
including a discussion of contemporary nationalism.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. New York: International Universities Press, 1982.

Ecrits is a selection of essays from this important gure in contemporary
psychoanalysis. Included in this volume is Lacans articulation of the mirror stage.
. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: Norton, 1981.

Lacan collects twenty essays on his major theoretical concepts. Included are the
questions and answers generated by the essays rst presented as a seminar. Chapters
are devoted to the linguistic structure of the unconscious, the mirror state of the child,
and sexuality and the signier.
Lash, Scott, and Jonathan Friedman, eds. Modernity and Identity. Oxford and
Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
A collection of essays by such theorists as Marshall Berman, Martin Jay, George Marcus,
and Richard Rorty which explore the redenition of subjectivity in the debate between
modernism and postmodernism.
Lee, Jonathan Scott, Jacques Lacan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts

Press, 1990.
Lee provides an accessible text on the development of Lacans theories, documenting
the split between Lacan and other schools of psychoanalysis in favor of one rooted in
the linguistic.
Marcus, George E., and Michel M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
The authors focus on cultural anthropology to elucidate the larger crisis of representation
in the human sciences before considering the role of ethnography in cultural critique.
Through various examples, ethnographic research is shown to problematize the
founding theories of cultural anthropology as an intellectual discipline.
Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.
This collection of the British cultural theorists writings on black popular culture and
identity politics includes Black Hair/Style Politics, Monster Metaphors: Notes on
Michael Jacksons Thriller, and Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert
Mapplethorpe.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London and New
York: Methuen, 1991.
Moi introduces and contextualizes the work of Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray as a base
from which to explore the conuence of critical theory and political realities from
feminist paradigms.
Morely, David, and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic
Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Morley and Robinss spatialization of identity and culture examines the
transformation of identity from older forms tied to conventional geography to newer
forms occasioned by a postmodern geography of communications technologies.
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London and New York: Verso, 1986.
These ten essays by Rose examine the importance of sexual diKerence and the
construction of the imaginary within the various representations of feminism.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1978.

Saids seminal essay explores the exoticized concept of orientalism from its base in the
academy. Said reexamines the relationship between Western scholarship of the Orient
and how that study has rendered the subject of the Orient as mysterious, and
ultimately inferior to the occident.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Sedgwick deconstructs the psychic space of the closet while arguing that modern life
cannot be considered critically without understanding how culture is structured by the
binary of homosexual/heterosexual. Through attentive readings of the novels Billy Budd
and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, in addition to other literary works, Sedgwick provides a
deft analysis of one of the most digcult aspects of gay and lesbian life.
Soija, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined

Places. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Soija addresses the spatial turn in contemporary critical thought by arguing for a
trilectics (as opposed to a dialectics) of spatiality, which is perceived, conceived, and
lived. He draws his examples from analyses of contemporary Los Angeles and the urban
fabric of Amsterdam to the radical openness of the margin evoked by bell hooks and
Michel Foucaults hetero-topologies. Soija opens the text with a spatial biography of
Henri Lefebvre, who provides a theoretical foundation to much of Soijas argumentation.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics. New

York: Methuen, 1988.
Spivak applies Marxist, post-colonialist, and deconstructionist methods and examines the
relationship of language, women, and ideology in the cultures from which they emerge.
. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York:

Routledge, 1990.
Spivak addresses, through essays and interviews, pre-colonial representations of others
and the implications of a multicultural society and its impact on the concept of identity
in a post-colonial, postmodern world.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Suleiman explores the male foundations of this centurys avant-garde, in particular the
French avant-garde in art and literature, with chapters devoted to Alain Robbe-Grillet,
Georges Bataille, and Andr Breton. Suleiman explores the concept of a postmodern
feminist poetics and their relationship to a theory of the avant-garde.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London
and New York: Routledge, 1993.
At the heart of Taussigs study is the relationship between likeness (mimesis) and
diKerence (alterity), self and other, as it is performed at diKerent times and places. An
eclectic history of Euro-American colonialism, Mimesis and Alterity discusses myths of
rst contact, Latin American ethnography, the camera and photography as mimetically
capacious machines that form part of a history of mimesis, and the relationship
between the primitive and the modern.
Ugwu, Catherine, ed. Lets Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. Seattle:
Bay Press, 1995.
Produced in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Lets Get It
On discusses the work of performance artists on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays
consider the historical role of black expressive culture, the performance of identity in
masquerade and carnival, as well as the role of spectacle and spectatorship. Among the
essays are bell hookss Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition, Paul Gilroys
. . . to be real: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture, and Coco Fuscos
Performance and the Power of the Popular.
Warhol, Robyn R., and Diane Price Herndl, eds. Feminisms: An Anthology of
Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
This extensive collection gathers fty-eight essays from the mid-1970s to 1990, covering
the diverse spectrum of feminist theory and writing. The essays are divided into
thirteen sections that examine the intersections of feminism and questions of class,
race, sexual orientation, and nationality.
media studies and technology
Allen, Robert, ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and

Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
A number of critical perspectives (feminist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, etc.) are
utilized in this analysis of the social and cultural aspects of television. The collection
includes Ellen Seiters Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television, an accessible
introduction to semiotic theory drawing on examples from television news and
entertainment, and John Fiskes British Cultural Studies and Television, a survey of
pioneering audience-based research in television studies.
Ang, Ien. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World.
Given the interest in issues of media consumption, Angs text provides a theoretical
overview from which to begin the process. Ang argues that we must rst rethink the
very notion of audience as an institutional construct. These nine essays provide an
attentive, critical assessment of studies on television audiences, romance novel
readers, and empirical audience research, as well as the eKects of global and
transnational media systems on the production of local meaning.
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1996.
Balsamo gives a gendered reading of contemporary technoscience developments in which
the body remains central to discussions of race and gender. Among the topics: cyborgs,
feminist bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery, medical imaging technologies, and reproductive
technologies. Balsamo argues for feminist cultural studies of science and technology.
Bender, Gretchen, and Timothy Druckrey, eds. Cultures on the Brink: Ideologies of
Technologies. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.
As implied by the subtitle, this collection of essays challenges the popularly held
conception that technology is naturally progressive, with an emphasis on how diKerent
technologies are structured and encompass not a single ideology but many. Stanley
Aronowitz, Elain Scarry, Margaret Morse, Laurie Anderson, Avital Ronnell, Andrew Ross,
and others consider a host of topics, from smart technologies and Rodney King to
airport security checks, the Human Genome Project, and the future of work.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
Bolter examines the new interactive role of the reader and writer in the hypertext
authoring format of computer technology, dividing his study into both visual and
conceptual writing spaces, with a chapter devoted to the intersection of critical
theory and the hypertext format.
Brook, James, and Iain A. Boal, eds. Resisting the Virtual Life. San Francisco: City
Lights, 1994.
An antidote to the never-ending onslaught of technological hype, these twenty
scholars, writers, and activists challenge the received wisdom of how technology will
better our lives. This collection looks critically at the role of information access and
interpretation, the rewiring of the human body, the degradation of work, and the
restructuring of modern life.
Coyne, Richard. Designing Information Technologies in the Postmodern Age.

Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1995.
Coyne is interested in what role philosophical thought can play in the development of

computer-based technologies, considering a variety of philosophies and their relationship
to key claims of information technologies. For example, Coyne uses aspects of critical
theory to examine issues of power and control, and draws from phenomenology when
examining questions about experience in virtual environments.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the

Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Crary examines the roots of our society of the spectacle from the technological and
social inroads made in the nineteenth century. He reassesses the problems of visuality
in modern society from the vantage point of both the observer and the subject.
Debray, Rgis. Media Manifestos. London and New York: Verso, 1996.
Debray inaugurates a new discipline of mediology to address the limitations of previous
enterprises such as semiotics and communication theory while acknowledging the
materiality of transmission technologies in contemporary life. Mediology, as the author
writes, seeks to mediate between the aesthetic and the technological, recognizing that
sociological analysis forgoes the object but a technological analysis foregrounds the
object while forgetting the subjects and social milieu.
Druckrey, Timothy, ed. Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation.

New York: Aperture Foundation, 1996.
Druckrey gathers twenty-nine essays written by philosophers, critics, artists, and
theorists who consider the cultural transformations of visual representation
precipitated by the advent of electronic technologies. Included in this collection are
Vannevar Bushs 1945 essay As We May Think, N. Katherine Hayles Virtual Bodies and
Flickering Signiers, Slavoj Zizeks From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of the
Real, Friedrich Kittlers There Is No Software, and Sherry Turckles Constructions and
Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book. London and New
York: Verso, 1997.
A classic study of the Annales school of historical thought in France, Febvre and Martin
trace the development of the book as a material and cultural object. Surveying the
impact of printing on society and thought from 1450 to 1800, the authors cover both
technical developments and social forces in their analysis of an emerging print culture.
Gray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. London and New York: Routledge,
1995.
What is a cyborg? The answer is given in over ve hundred pageseverything you ever
wanted to know about cyborgs and some things you didnt. Historical materials,
scientic documents, military programs, science ction texts, technoscience theory, as
well as several appendices on cyborg culture provide an exhaustive account.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan
_Meets_OncoMouse. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Haraway extends her cultural analysis of technoscience into the growing social
landscape of genetically engineered life, cyborgs, reproductive technologies, and virtual
realities. This eclectic book is structured within tripartite divisions of syntax, semantics,
and pragmatics, giving us an introduction to the grammar of feminism and
technoscience, introducing a narrative linked through three characters, Modest
Witness, FemaleMan, and OncoMouse, before ending with a series of meditations
on gene mapping, virtual speculums, invisible fetuses, and other things.
. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: Reinvention of Nature. London and New

York: Routledge, 1991.
This inuential text provides a feminist reading of technoscience developments,
including the widely inuential essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science and Technology and
Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. The text also includes Haraways
theory of situated knowledge, a rejoinder against scientic (male) objectivity, as well
as a discussion of the biopolitics of postmodern bodies.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 18801918. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kern discusses the sweeping changes that took place at the turn of the century and how
they aKected personal social understandings of time and space. Kern cites Marcel
Proust, James Joyce, H. G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo
Picasso, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, among others, in his attempt to connect the
various disciplines of art and science to the social history of the period.
Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory

and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Drawing heavily on both Derrida and Barthes, Landow assesses the impact of electronic
text, or hypertext, oKering chapters on the relationship between critical theory and
hypertext, the new roles of writers and readers, and the impact hypertexts will have on
education and literature.
Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1974.
As the title suggests, Metz applies aspects of semiotics and structuralism to his classic
analysis of lm and cinema. Among the topics discussed are the reality principle in cinema,
lm narrative, the problems of a semiotics of lm, and modern cinema and montage.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Important social and cultural analysis of the impact of print culture on civilization by
this maverick thinker who gained great popularity in the 1960s. The Gutenberg Galaxy

demonstrates McLuhans aphoristic writing style rendered typographically as pull-
quotes with an index of these glosses.
. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

McLuhan sets forth the thesis that new models of mass communications in the form of
electronic technology were fundamentally changing social and interpersonal
relationships. The text contains his famous dictums the medium is the message, and
concept of a global village.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage. New York:
Bantam Books, 1967.
This text continues to explore the increasing social interdependence and its impact on
personal life ushered in with the new electronic technology. The title turns the phrase
from McLuhans earlier work Understanding Media. Quentin Fiore, a graphic designer, is
credited as co-author for this very visual and graphic rendition of McLuhans text.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social

Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Meyrowitzs thesis includes the concept that television has fundamentally changed our
perceptions about social place and hierarchy. Social behavior is no longer determined
by where we are or who is there, but rather is mediated by electronic technology which
blurs notions of private and public space.
Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and
New York: Methuen, 1982.
Ongs text explores the profound shift in social thought and experience surrounding
the transition from oral to literate culture. Ong focuses on speech, writing, and print,
but also explores the impact of electronic technology on human consciousness.
Moser, Mary Anne, and Douglas Macleod, eds. Immersed in Technology: Art and
Virtual Environments. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996.
This collection of essays and artists projects addresses the need to critically appraise
the evolving eld of immersive technologies and virtual environments. From various
disciplinary perspectives, the writers and artists ponder the consequences of race and
identity in cyberspace, materiality and the body, and aspects of narrative and landscape.
Among the oKerings are essays by N. Katherin Kayles, Cameron Bailey, Allucquere
Rosanne Stone, Avital Ronell, and Margaret Morse.
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Ronell applies methods of post-structuralism and deconstruction in this case study of
the telephone as a manifestation of discontinuity and absence in the modern world. The
text is rendered in a unique typographic treatment by graphic designer Richard Eckersley.
Schneider, Cynthia, and Brian Wallis, eds. Global Television. Cambridge, MA, and
London: MIT Press, 1988.
Twenty-four essays discuss the role of television in relationship to nationalism,
technological expansion, information ow, and issues of representation and the politics
of resistance. Contributors include Ien Ang, Jay Chiat, Jonathan Crary, Maud Lavin, Carol
Squiers, Paul Virilio, and Michelle Wallace.
StaKord, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art
and Medicine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
StaKords history of the human body focuses on the paradigmatic shifts occurring in the
eighteenth century with the development of new methods of exploring the hidden
aspects of the body. Chapters are devoted to these new methods for seeing and include:
Dissecting, Abstracting, Conceiving, Marking, Magnifying, and Sensing.
Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Fitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies

in Film Semiotics. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
A comprehensive guide to contemporary discussions of lm theory through semiotics,
narratology, psychoanalysis, and postructuralism. Beginning with a general introduction
to semiotic theory and proceeding to specic terms from lm semiotics and narrative,
the writers discuss the application of psychoanalytic theory to lm studies and the role
that intertextuality plays in the discourse of the lm.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1995.
In a unique prose style, Stone provides a thoughtful meditation on the ways in which
computer-mediated technologies are challenging conventional notions of identity.
Stone makes her arguments with a provocative range of subjects, from phone sex lines
and user domains to a virtual, cross-dressing psychiatrist and the vampire Lestat.
Through specic cases, Stone demonstrates the mutability of identity.
Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
Virilio continues his studies in dromology by addressing how transmission technologies
have collapsed both the extension of space and the duration of time as information
becomes speed. Virilios philosophy of technology gives us the concept of an art of the
motor which drives the constant change of appearances and the continued mutilation
of reality.
. The Vision Machine. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 1994.
A wide-ranging survey of visual technologies involved in the perception, production,
and dissemination of images. Virilio contemplates the shifting regime of the visual,
from nineteenth-century inventions of photography and the cinema to the latest
smart technologies of war and commerce.

. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
Originally published in 1977, this book outlines Virilios study of speed, or dromology.
Locating its roots in the mobilization of the masses in modern society, literally in the
streets, Virilio charts the progress of dromology from Nazi propaganda techniques and
the building of the autobahn to Marinettis aesthetics of speed and the easily forged
links to state power and warfare.
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. London and New York:
Routledge, 1995.
In this sociological investigation into the impact of information technologies on society.
Webster introduces and carefully critiques the theoretical positions on information put
forth by Daniel Bells post-industrial society, Anthony Giddenss thoughts on surveillance
and the expansion of powers of the nation-state, Herbert Schillers arguments on corporate
capital expansion, Jrgen Habermass concerns about the dissolution of the public sphere,
Jean Baudrillards theory of simulation, and Manuel Castells informational cities.
philosophy and history
Adams, Hazard, and Leroy Searle, eds. Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee:
University of Florida Press, 1986.
An excellent selection of important essays from the late twentieth century including
Chomsky, Searle, Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, and more. Included is an extensive appendix
with fundamental texts from earlier in the century.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. by Maria Jolas. Foreword by

Etienne Gilson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
In these inuential essays on the intimacy and enormity of space, Bachelard applies a
phenomenological analysis of spaces such as nests, shells, and corners, and is
particularly concerned with their experimental relationship with poetic imagination and
reverie. Also included is the important chapter The Dialectics of Inside and Outside.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday

Press, 1972.
One of Barthes earliest (1957) and most accessible works, analyzing popular culture in
the form of very brief essays on a variety of topics. Included is the essay Myth Today, a
summary of Barthes framework dening his concept of mythology.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Charles
Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981.
Baudrillard extends the Marxist analysis of the use and exchange value of commodities
with the addition of the concept of sign value. Of particular importance to design is the
essay Design and Environment, which analyzes the functionalist design philosophy at
the Bauhaus in relation to political economy.
. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, New York: Semiotext(e) 1983.
Baudrillard introduces his concepts of hyperreality and the simulacrum of
contemporary (late-capitalist) culture with a discussion of panopticism and spectacle.
Benjamin, Watler. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken

Books, 1978.
This selection of essays by the noted critic, mostly written in the 1930s, includes the
seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which denes
the challenges confronting authorship, authenticity, and originality in the wake of
modern technology that allows for reproducible and multiple artworks.
. Reections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. by Peter

Demtz. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
This collection of Benjamins writings includes the essay The Author as Producer, his
analysis of the politics of cultural production particularly within the social frameworks
of fascism, socialism, and communism.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Culler focuses his attention on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man and their
theories of deconstruction, giving a detailed explanation of its central methods and
ideas, with particular emphasis on the notion of reading and readers.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Fredy Perlman and John Supak.
Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.
. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Malcolm Imrie. London
and New York: Verso, 1990.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle updates Debords seminal work, originally
published in 1967, with discussion on the events of the 1980s. A principal member of the
Situationist group, Debords text discusses the formation of the modern spectacle as a
product of an industrialized society.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall.

Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984.
Originally published in 1974, this text is among the rst to take seriously the role of the
consumer in contemporary life. Mixing aspects of philosophy, sociology, history, literary
criticism, economics, and anthropology, de Certeaus work dees easy categorization.
The collection includes the essay Walking in the City, and de Certeaus examination of
the uses of language in The Scriptural Economy and Reading as Poaching, and further
investigation of the practice of theory in the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.

. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988.
De Certeau considers historiography as fundamentally a writing practice whereby the
historian animates a narrative and produces places. Inected by aspects of psychoanalysis
and theology, de Certeau examines the changing conceptions of history into the West.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993.
A collection of many important texts by one of the leading gures in contemporary
critical theory. Among the essays are Rhizome versus Trees, A Theory of the Other,
Psychoanalysis and Desire, Cinema and Space: The Frame, Cinema and Time,
Painting and Sensation, and On the Line. Together the essays cover the many facets
of Deleuzes criticism including lm, theater, literature, music, painting, and philosophy.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
An inuential work which exposes the repression of late capitalist culture through an
examination of the psychic processes used in the formation of desire.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1976.
First published in French in 1967, this text introduces many of Derridas thoughts on
deconstruction, which includes an analysis of the status of writing in Western culture
with discussions of Rousseau, Saussure, and Lvi-Strauss, among others.
. Writing and DiKerence. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1978.
Writing and DiKerence contains essays rst published in French in 1967 and is seen as
the second volume of Of Grammatology, although written in the same time frame.
Included among the essays are Derridas reappraisal of the philosophic traditions
exclusion of writing, the introduction of the concept of diKrence, and a critical
analysis of structuralism.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language.

Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
English translation of two of Foucaults French publications, LArchologie du Savoir of
1969 and LOrdre du discourse of 1971. Major text describing the French philosophers
histriographic method employed in his earlier works, which attempts to illuminate the
connections between knowledge, language, and power.
. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Foucaults examination of the history of the social modes of disciplining and punishing
bodies. Of particular interest is the role of spectacle involved in the changing forms of
punishment and incarceration with an important and oft-quoted chapter devoted to
panopticism.
. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York:

Vintage Books, 1970.
In this English translation of his 1966 work, Les Mots et les choses, Foucault examines the
notion of a man-centered philosophy as a shift in thought between the seventeenth
centurys natural sciences and the nineteenth centurys human sciences.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Greenblatt vividly recreates and recasts the relationship between the colonial conquest
of Columbus and the inhabitants of the New World. While conventional historical
accounts try to decipher a reality from historical documents and travel accounts,
Greenblatt instead focuses on European representational practice itself.
Habermas, Jrgen. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G.

Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
This compilation of twelve lectures by the noted German philosopher constitutes a
dialogue with other critics, mostly notably Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, over
his notions of the enlightenment in the embodiment of the modern project.
. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category

of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick G. Lawrence.
Habermass work on the social sphere, concerning the evolution of public opinion in
democratic societies is a signicant historical and sociological study of the foundations
of public life.
. Theory of Communicative Action, Volumes I & II. Trans. Thomas McCarthy.

Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.
This work is considered one of the major achievements in Habermass career and
contains his articulation of a theory of communicative action, which is central to his
work in cultural studies. Habermas contrasts communicative action with rational-
purposive action, with emphasis on the examination of the role individuals play in the
resulting consensus of communicative norms and their ability to express sincerely their
intentions to others.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 19231950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Jays authoritative examination of the Institute of Social Researchs major thinkers
including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and more recently
Jrgen Habermas. Jay documents the collective inuence of the Frankfurt School on the
development of critical theory.
. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French

Thought. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993.
Historian Martin Jay examines the persistent criticism of vision in the French intellectual
thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Debord, Irgaray, Derrida,
Bataille, Barthes, and Metz. Jay includes a history of the theory of vision from Antiquity
to the Enlightenment, considering the ocularcentric nature of the discourse.
Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers from Structuralism to

Postmodernity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Biographical and bibliographic summaries for major theorists of this century in
chapters such as Early Structuralism, (covering, e.g., Bachelard, Bakhtin, Freud, and
Mauss); Structuralism (e.g., Althusser, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss, and
Metz); Post-structuralist Thought (e.g., Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault);
Semiotics (e.g., Saussure, Barthes, Eco, Greimas, and Kristeva); Post-Marxism (e.g.,
Laclau, Habermas, Adorno, and Arendt); and Postmodernity (e.g., Baudrillard, Lyotard).
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.

GeoK Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
Lyotard describes the collapse of the legitimizing force of the meta-narrative of
modernism through the language games found in the discourse of postmodern culture.
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Marcus uses the Sex Pistols as a point of departure to explore the role of cultural
subversion of the counter-culture through the Middle Ages to the present.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. Revised ed. London and
New York: Routledge, revised edition, 1991.
Originally published in 1982 and revised in 1986, the 1991 version contains an expanded
bibliography on Derrida and deconstruction as well as a response to critics of
deconstruction. This text is a clear and concise summary of the major themes of
deconstruction found in Derridas writing and philosophy.
Orr, Leonard. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Orrs dictionary is an extensively researched compendium of terms fathered from a
variety of texts under the rubric of critical theory. Entries include the bibliographic
citations on which the denitions are based. Included are terms from both European
and Asian languages.
Veesar, Aram H., ed. The New Historicism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
Veesar collects essays written by some of the major gures associated with New
Historicism, including Stephen Greenblatt, Lous Montrose, Vincent Pecora, and Frank
Lentricchia. This grouping of essays attempts an uneasy denition of New Historicism;
its originating theories and inuences, some practical applications, as well as a critique
of its limitations.
semiotics and literary criticism
Barthes, Roland. Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977.
A seminal collection of essays by the French literary critic. Particularly relevant to
graphic design are the essays about photography and text, including The Photographic
Message, Rhetoric of the Image, Death of the Author, and From Work to Text.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
What are the ve faces of modernity? Calinescu gives the answer in his ve chapters
on modernism, the avant-garde, and the concepts of decadence, kitsch, and
postmodernism. Drawing primarily from literature, Calinescu provides an excellent
mapping of modernity. The chapters devoted to the avant-garde and kitsch are
especially informative.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. New York, Toronto, and

London: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
Assembled from the lecture notes of former students and published after de Saussures
death, Course in General Linguistics is the fundamental text for linguistics theory.
Saussure discusses the relationships between sign, signier, and signied, the
immutability and mutability of the sign, and linguistic value, among other topics.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 1983.
One of the most widely used and accessible introductory texts on literary criticism.
Literary Theory includes discussion of the major theories of the day, with chapters on
phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis.

Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley, CA: University of
Hawkess book is an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of semiotics and the
philosophy of structuralism, and includes a discussion of the application of semiotics to
other disciplines, with chapters on Jean Piaget and Claude Lvi-Strauss, among others.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University press, 1978.
Iser puts forth his theory of the interaction between readers and literary texts. He discusses
the concept of reception theory and traditional arguments against such perspectives,
as well as acts of interpretation and the asymmetry between readers and texts.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Jameson makes his case for understanding texts through the interpretive codes and
practices that inform the reception and interpretation of a work. Jameson stresses the
always-already-read condition of texts informed by previous traditions.
Lentricchia, Frank, and Tomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990.
This introduction to the major themes and terms encountered in literary criticism
includes examinations by twenty-three scholars of terms such as representation,
interpretation, intention, rhetoric, culture, canon, gender, race, ethnicity, and ideology,
providing denitions and citing specic examples from literature.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London, Henley, and Boston:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Originally published in France in 1966, this text analyzes literature as a form of cultural
production from an Althussarian perspective and Marxist tradition. Macherey considers
texts by Verne, Balzac, and Borges, and precedes his commentary with a consideration
of theoretical concepts such as Criticism and Judgment, Rule and Law, Front and
Back, Creation and Production, Interior and Exterior, and Depth and Complexity.
Morgan, John, and Peter Welton. See What I Mean: An Introduction to Visual
Communication. London: Edward Arnold, 1986.
An accessible and introductory text on the basics of communication, See What I Mean
includes sections devoted to connotation and denotation, cultural codes and conventions,
metaphor and metonymy, and symbolic and iconic imagery. Special emphasis is placed
on design as a communicative process and tool for the generation of specic meaning.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Peirce on Signs. Ed. James Hooper. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina, 1991.
This is a collection of seminal writings by logician Charles Sanders Peirce and his
formulation of a general theory of signs, better known as semiotics. Peirce proposes a
triadic relation between objects, signs, and interpretants, and also gives us the
fundamental categories of icon, index, and symbol. The writings also include Peirces
thoughts on pragmatism, logic, and theology.
Poster, Mark. Critical Theory and Post-structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

Posters text oKers a brief account of the diKerences in French post-structuralist theory
and the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School and Jrgen Habermas in
particular. Poster devotes much of the discussion to the work of Michel Foucault and
concludes with his ideas regarding the mode of information, an argument which has
as its central thesis that new information technologies warrant a fundamental
reconsideration of social action.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-

structuralism. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
These twelve essays explore the changes in theories of the reader from New Criticism,
structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Among the
contributions are Tompkins own The Reader in History, Jonathan Cullers Literary
Competence, Stanley Fishs Literature in the Reader, and Wolfgang Isers The
Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford
In this inuential book, Williams outlines his case for a cultural materialism informing
our understanding not only of literature but also of the signicance of Marxism
on the analysis of literary production. Williams denes key concepts such as culture,
literature, and ideology before moving on to base and superstructure,
hegemony, and dominant, residual, and emergent forms, as well as issues of writing,
creativity, genre, and authorship.
Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in

Advertising. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1978.
Williamsons important critique on the construction of meaning in advertising begins
by using semiological and psychoanalytical theories to understand the construction of
meaning in advertising, while the second half analyzes its ideological dimensions.

Cognition and Emotion
Bibliography
ELIZABETH B.-N. SANDERS
This bibliography contains an eclectic array of topics that fall under the broad categories
of human cognition and emotion. The references on cognition are more extensive
than the references on emotion, in part due to the cognitive revolution begun with the
1956 publication of A Study of Thinking by Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and
George A. Austin. During the past forty years the study of cognition has grown dramatically,
while only a few researchers have shown interest in the subject of emotion. The
bibliography presents academic references from psychology and anthropology, as well
as books that specically refer to design practice and education. Collectively they reect
the increasing interdisciplinarity of both design and cognitive science. There has been
no attempt to demarcate the relevance of references to individual design disciplines;
people are people, whether using a product, engaging in communication, or experiencing
an environment.
Adams, Marilyn J. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Urbana-
Champaign: The Reading Research and Education Center, 1990.
Adams has brought together a vast body of research on the reading process into a
concise statement about how children acquire reading skills. She also draws implications
from the research and states clearly how these skills should be taught in the classroom.
This is one of the few truly enjoyable books written about the process of reading.
401
Adams, Parveen, ed. Language in Thinking: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1972.
An excellent selection of articles on the ways in which language relates to thinking and
how language can aKect the manner in which we perceive and act in the world. Parveen
contrasts diKerent theoretical perspectives on these issues and provides experimental
work related to each as well. The contributors, among others, include Piaget, Whorf,
Vygotsky, Lenneberg, and Chomsky.
Bailey, James. After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence.

New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Bailey analyzes the major shifts of human thought as a result of computation and
science. He explains how computers are now changing what we do, but also how we
think and what we think about. His ideas are accessible to a general audience.
Bohm, David. Thought as a System. New York: Routledge, 1992.

This book is essentially a description of a seminar that took place in Ojai, California, in
1990. Written in a conversational mode, the book is perhaps the most accessible of
Bohms works. In it, he explores the manner in which thought actively participates in
forming our perceptions, our sense of meaning, and our everyday activities.
. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1980.

Bohm explores issues such as understanding the nature of reality in general (and
consciousness in particular), as well as the relationship of thinking to reality. He argues
for the view that the universe and the mind are undivided wholes, each inseparable into
their constituent parts. This is a digcult, yet often cited, work.
Bower, T. G. R. The Perceptual World of the Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Bower reviews experimental research ndings on how the very young child perceives
the world around him and how he grows in his ability to make sense of what he perceives.
Bower draws implications with regard to how we should provide stimulation for normal
infants, as well as for how to overcome sensory decits in handicapped children.
Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle: Integral
Press, 1996.
This is a very good introduction to the study of the meme (the basic unit of cultural
transmission, or imitation), and the eld of memetics (the study of the workings of
memes: how they interact, replicate, and evolve.) It is well written and easy to
understand, with many good applications and examples.

Bruner, Jerome S. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
In a series of essays, Bruner examines and compares two modes of thought: the logico-
scientic and the narrative, because as with the stereoscope, depth is better achieved
by looking from two points at once.
. Childs Talk: Learning to Use Language. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.

In this delightful little book, Bruner explores the childs acquisition of language not in
the laboratory but in the home, in order to understand the issues of context sensitivity
and the format of the mother-child interaction. Of particular interest is his analysis of
the game peek-a-boo.
Bruner, Jerome S., Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin. A Study of Thinking.
New York: John Wiley, 1956.
This book may possibly be the earliest challenge to the behaviorist tradition. The authors
investigated classication and categorization, but instead of treating their experimental
subjects like laboratory animals, the authors treated them as active, constructive
problem-solvers and found they were using a variety of strategies to solve problems.
Cialdini, Robert B. Inuence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Revised ed. New York:
William Morrow and Company, 1993.
First published in 1984, this new edition includes contributions from readers of the
rst edition. Cialdini explores the persuasion process at work in todays marketplace.
His evidence comes from a provocative mixture of experimental studies and participant
observation. The book is organized around six basic principles of human behavior:
consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.
Clark, Herbert H. and Eve V. Psychology and Language: An Introduction to

Psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
An introduction to psycholinguistics (the psychology of language), this textbook does
not require technical knowledge of either psychology or linguistics. It is a readable
overview of the eld organized around three primary processes: comprehension (i.e.,
the study of listening), production (i.e., the study of speaking), and acquisition (i.e., how
children learn to listen and speak). It also contains a useful glossary of terms.
Corballis, Michael C., and Ivan L. Beale. The Psychology of Left and Right.
The authors set out to investigate what it means to tell left from right, starting with the
psychological literature, and found themselves exploring philosophy, anthropology,
biochemistry, and theoretical physics as well. This fascinating book does not require a
background in psychology to enjoy it.
SANDERS: COGNITION AND EMOTION BIBLIOGRAPHY 403

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
Csikszentmihalyi interviewed over ninety people who have transformed our culture,
including artists, authors, scientists, and more, in order to understand the ways in which
creativity has been a force in their lives. He builds on his ow theory by addressing
the ways these people have made ow a permanent feature of their lives.
. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi reports on over twenty-ve years of psychological research on
happiness. He identies a phenomenon which he calls owa state of consciousness
that people report when they are engaged in fun, challenging, and often creative
activities. He describes individuals who lead relatively happy and meaningful lives by
having harnessed the power of ow experiences.
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
New York: Avon Books, 1994.
Damasio describes a connecting trail . . . from reason to feelings to body. Starting from
evidence based on neurological patients aKected by brain damage, Damasio shows how
emotions and feelings are critical to rational thinking. He also argues that the essence
of a feeling is a direct perception of the state of the body. A fascinating book, accessible
to a general audience.
De Bono, Edward. The Mechanism of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.
De Bono introduced a theory in the late 1960s of how the mind handles information;
the theory was not acknowledged by other psychologists until at least twenty years
later. In the meantime, De Bono put his ideas about lateral thinking to use by writing
and teaching on the topic at a global scale.
De Hirsch, Katrina. Language and the Developing Child. Baltimore: The Orton
Dyslexia Society, 1984.
This is a collection of writings on child language development from one of the pioneers
in the eld of learning disabilities. It is written not only for clinicians, but for parents
and teachers, as well. Among the issues addressed are dyslexia, autism, and stuttering.
De Villiers, Peter A. and Jill G. Early Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

The authors describe the language acquisition process, from birth to school age, using
many informative and amusing examples. They pay special attention to the childs
propensity toward linguistic inventions and systematic errors. This book is written for
parents, educators, child-care professionals, and students.

Dennett, Daniel C. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness.
Dennett, a philosopher, explores the questions what is a mind? and who else has
one? He takes an evolutionary approach to these questions as he explores human,
machine, and animal minds.
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. New York: G. P. Putnams
Sons, 1989.
Edwards applies current ndings and theories in brain research, particularly recent
discoveries about the right hemisphere, to the teaching of drawing skills. The notes and
quotes in the side bars are especially good.
Elliot, Alison J. Child Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Elliot looks at the linguistic development of the child within the context of the childs
general development. She reviews the research of Noam Chomsky, Roger Brown, and
Jean Piaget, among others.
Frith, Uta, ed. Cognitive Processes in Spelling. New York: Academic Press, 1980.
This book attempts to answer questions such as: How is spelling knowledge acquired?
How is it used? Why do some people lose it or never acquire it at all? The authors
explore the spelling process in children, normal adults, adult illiterates, and in children
with special problems such as dyslexia.
Fromkin, Victoria A., ed. Errors in Linguistic Performance: Slips of the Tongue, Ear,
Pen and Hand. New York: Academic Press, 1980.
Fromkin has put together the works of linguists, psychologists, neurologists, and
aphasiologists on the topic of deviant linguistic performance data. She also brings in
Freuds hypotheses concerning the possible causes underlying slips. This is one of the
earliest cross-disciplinary looks at slips.
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York:
Basic Books, 1983.
In a bold move away from the then-acceptable views of human intelligence, Gardner
proposed that there are multiple varieties of intelligence including linguistic, logical-
mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. His
fellow psychologists largely ignored his work, but the community of professional
educators, parents, and the business community did not.

. The Minds New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York:
Basic Books, 1987.
For someone wishing to become familiar with the origins and evolution of the cognitive
science, this wonderful and readable book is the place to begin. Gardner took a long
view, returning to the philosophical origins and to the histories of the various
disciplines involved. His work is based not only upon a reading of the literature, but also
upon extensive, informal interviews with leaders in the eld.
. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Ten years after the publication of Frames of Mind, Gardner brings together both
previously published and original essays to provide a picture of what has been learned
about the educational applications of the Multiple Intelligences Theory, from both
research and in-school experiences.
Garvey, Catherine. Childrens Talk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Garvey looks at the importance of talk to the childs overall cognitive and social
development. She shows, through example, that talk is an integral part of the childs life
and that it reveals their thinking and social interactions. This book is written for
Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind.
Gazzaniga broke from the traditional scientic style in this chronological narrative of
his discoveries during his twenty-ve years of brain research. He proposes a modular
view of the brain function, a social brain made up of a confederation of mental systems
within each part of us.
Gentner, Dedre, and Albert L. Stevens, eds. Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983.
Two books titled Mental Models were published in 1983 (see also Johnson-Laird). This
volume oKers attempts to capture naturalistic domain knowledge from a wide variety
of domains, including physical systems, mechanical systems, interactive devices, and
navigation.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

This science ction novel has had a profound impact on our understanding of feelings
about cyberspace, as Gibson called the information space that exists within and
between computers. It paints a futuristic picture of the connections that exist among
the social, commercial, and political institutions as seen through the eyes of the hacker
hero, Case, a cowboy of information space.
Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1995.
Goleman introduces the concept of EQ (emotional intelligence) in order to compare

and contrast the relative contributions of emotional and intellectual (IQ) abilities. He
argues that high IQ alone does not guarantee success in life, and that EQ is, perhaps, a
more important contributor to success in relationships, work, and physical well-being.
Goodnow, Jacqueline. Children Drawing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1977.
Goodnow investigates what it is about the childs mind that leads him to draw as he
does. This is a well-researched book that is at the same time an engrossing read. It is full
of examples of childrens drawings. Every parent should read it. This book is written for
Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with
Autism. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
This is a fascinating view of the world from a visual thinker who has pictures for thoughts.
Grandin is an assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. She is
autistic, yet has been able to describe in writing how her visual mind works and how
she was able to make the connection between her impairment and animal temperament,
resulting in her remarkable ability to design humane livestock-handling facilities.
Hampden-Turner, Charles. Maps of the Mind: Charts and Concepts of the Mind
and Its Labyrinths. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
The author has collected, described, and drawn in maplike form the most important
concepts put forth about the human mind by the worlds greatest thinkers, writers,
scientists, artists, and philosophers. This book is remarkable in its breadth of scope and
clarity of explanation. Each of the sixty maps is supported by bibliographic
information as a starting point for further discovery.
Holland, Dorothy, and Naomi Quinn, eds. Cultural Models in Language and
Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
This volume brings together contributors from anthropology, linguistics, and psychology
to discuss the role that cultural knowledgethat is, shared presuppositions about the
worldplays in human understanding.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Hutchins demonstrates how anthropological methods combined with cognitive theory
can give rise to a new perspective on cognitive science. He uses his background as both
a sailor and an anthropologist to provide an approach to studying activities in their
naturally occurring contexts, i.e., in the wild.
JackendoK, Ray. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
JackendoK explores the role of semantics, or the meaning of things, as a bridge
between the theory of language and theories of other cognitive capacities such as
motor control and visual perception.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind. Boston: Houghton Mihin, 1976.
In his delightful book, Jaynes combines literature and science to develop a theory of
evolution of consciousness. Jaynes argues that human consciousness is a learned
process that was brought about only three thousand years ago, and asserts that until
then, men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods.
Jonassen, David H., ed. The Technology of Text: Principles for Structuring,
Designing, and Displaying Text, vols. I and II. Englewood CliKs, NJ: Educational
Technology Publications, 1982.
This book focuses on principles (supported by years of research in psychology, reading,
instructional design, and typography) for organizing, designing, and displaying text. The
authors of the various chapters were, at the time of publication, active in the eld of
designing textual materials.
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. Human-Machine Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates, 1993.
This book is written with the goal of reaching an understanding of how the mind carries
out three sorts of thinkingdeduction, induction, and creationin order to consider what
goes right and wrong, and to explore computational models of these kinds of thinking.
. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and

Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Two books titled Mental Models were published in 1983 (see also Gentner and Stevens).
This volume oKers a unied theory of the major properties of the mind:
comprehension, inference, and consciousness. Johnson-Laird argues that the mind is a
model-building device that can itself be modeled on a computer.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the
Economic World. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
This book describes the new age we are entering in which, in Kellys words, the realm
of the born (all that is nature) and the world of the made (all that is humanly
constructed) are becoming one. The implications for humanity are profound. According
to the author, his friends claim that the twenty-eight-page annotated bibliography is the
best part of the bookbut I certainly would not skip the rest.
Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Penguin Books, 1964.

This classic work is made up of two books. Book One is aimed at the general reader. In
it, Koestler proposes a theory of the act of creation by looking at the processes underlying
scientic discovery, artistic originality, and humor. Book Two is more technical in its
exploration of the basic principles operating in the act of creation.

Kolers, Paul A., Merald E. Wrolstad, and Herman Bouma, eds. Processing of
Visible Language, vols. I and II. New York: Plenum Press, 1980.
An excellent selection and collection of articles by both researchers and practitioners
concerning the display and acquisition of visible language. The second volume contains
more that is relevant to interactions between people and computers. Contributors
include Jay Doblin, Patricia Wright, and Allen Newell, among others.
LakoK, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about
the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
The title of this book was inspired by an aboriginal language of Australia, which has a
category, balan, that actually includes women, re, and dangerous things, for as LakoK
declares there is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception,
action and speech. The book is divided into two parts: the rst covers the theoretical
groundwork, and the second presents three case studies to exemplify the issues addressed.
LakoK, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
LakoK and Johnson demonstrate that metaphor is not merely a poetical or rhetorical
phenomenon, but that it permeates virtually every aspect of human thought, including
how we perceive, think, and act. A classic.
Laurel, Brenda, ed. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. New York:
Addison-Wesley, 1990.
This is a large collection of ideas and opinions from leading thinkers in the computer
industry on the eld of human-computer interaction. It is a good example of applied
cognitive science. The contributors include, among others, Donald Norman, Ted Nelson,
Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte, and Timothy Leary.
Lee, Ian. The Third World War: Apostrophe Theory. New York: A&W Visual
Library, 1978.
This is an unusual and provocative look at the pun. Lee communicates his ideas in
simultaneous visual and verbal modes.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
This is the seminal work in the eld of cognitive mapping. Lynch introduces the
construct of a public image of a city which is the overlap of many individual images,
oKering ve types of elements that people use to describe their cognitive images of the
built environment: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarksconcepts relevant also
to the design of user environments, such as user-interfaces.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: The
Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: New Science Library,
Shambhala Publications, 1987.
Best stated by the authors, this book is a complete outline for an alternative view of
the biological roots of understanding. . . .We will propose a way of seeing cognition not
as representation of the world out there, but rather as an ongoing bringing forth of a
world through the process of living itself. As such, this work establishes a new
paradigm beyond cognition.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York:

HarperCollins/Kitchen Sink Press, 1994.
While this book is ostensibly about the ways in which graphic artists convey
information in comics, the author has, as he states in the introduction, even put
together a new comprehensive theory of the creative process and its implications for
comics and art in general, even though he is kind of young to be doing that sort of
thing. This book is expressed in comics, as well. Destined to become a classic.
McGhee, Paul E. Humor: Its Origin and Development. San Francisco: W. H.

Freeman & Co., 1979.
This book examines the nature and development of childrens laughter and humor.
McGhee traces the evolution of humor within the human species as well as its growth
in the individual. Written as an undergraduate text, this book requires no specialized
knowledge or background in order to enjoy it.
Miller, George, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram. Plans and the Structure of
Behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
The book that revealed the inadequacies of behaviorism, Plans is often credited with
beginning the cognitive revolution in psychology. The authors proposed a cybernetic
approach to behavior and, for the rst time, described human beings in terms of plans,
images, and goals.
Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Minksy explores the idea of mind as society. He describes the mind as an emergent
system of agents, each of whom has a very limited point of view. Complexity of
behavior, emotion, and thought are shown to emerge from the interplay of the
interactions and opposing views of these agents. Minsky provides an interesting if not
esoteric glossary, as well.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future Narrative in Cyberspace.

New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Murray takes a look at how technology is changing and will continue to change
storytelling. She claims that there will be an end to storytelling as we know it with the
advent of new computer technologies that oKer interactive tales, skips in time and
space, and truly immersive environments.

Neisser, Ulrich. Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive
Psychology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976.
Neisser presents an ecologically valid theory of human cognitionthat is, one that
has something to say about what people do in real, culturally signicant situations. He
uses both everyday examples and experimental ndings to support his theory. Readers
need no previous training in psychology to read this booka highly recommended classic.
Norman, Donald, ed. Perspectives on Cognitive Science. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence

Ten invited speakers came together in 1980 to share their very diKerent perspectives on
the birth and the future of cognitive science. This book is a result of that conference
with contributions by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank,
George LakoK, and others.
Norman, Donald A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: HarperCollins,

1988.
With this book (originally published under the title The Design of Everyday Things),
Norman can be credited with having introduced the eld of cognitive psychology to the
general public. In it, Norman tackles poorly conceived and poorly designed objects that
we use every day, making the reader keenly aware of the necessity for consideration of
the user during the product development process.
Paivio, Allan, and Ian Begg. Psychology of Language. Englewood CliKs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1981.
A graduate-level textbook for courses in psychology and/or psycholinguistics, the book
takes a historical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of language. The authors refer
to psycholinguistic theories as fads that come and go over time, choosing to emphasize
the enduring contributions from the eld to serve as guides for students to follow.
Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo. Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our

Minds. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994.
Palmarini delves into a proactive area about our subconscious thought processes. Using
real-life examples, he demonstrates how the human mind is predisposed to make
mistakes in judgment, mistakes that function as mental blinders. These psychological
mechanisms aKect all individuals every day without their realizing it. Our spontaneous
judgments are examined in a whole new light.
Potegal, Michael, ed. Spatial Abilities: Development and Physiological

Foundations. New York: Academic Press, 1982.
With so much of cognitive psychology focused on linguistic performance, this book is a
much-needed collection of theories and research on spatial abilities (an area certain to
grow in the future). From the multidisciplinary contributors, the topics addressed
include the sensory bases of spatial orientation and the development and role of
heredity and gender in spatial orientation.

Posner, Michael, ed. Foundation of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1993.
This is a relatively readable overview of the eld of cognitive science, including its
origins in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The methods
for studying the mind and brain are also covered. The foundations of the approach are
applied to the major cognitive domains.
Reynolds, Allan G., and Paul W. Flagg. Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge, MA:
Winthrop Publishers, 1977.
This is an undergraduate textbook that presupposes no previous sophistication in
psychology and is, thus, an excellent starting point for someone wishing to see the eld
from the vantage point of the late 1970s.
RogoK, Barbara, and Jean Lave, eds. Everyday Cognition: Its Development in
Social Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
The contributorsleading scholars in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and
anthropologyexamine the ways in which thinking occurs not only in the laboratory but
also in the real world of home, school, and the workplace. This contextual perspective
to development challenges the xed states of Jean Piaget.
Rosch, Eleanor, and Barbara B. Lloyd, eds. Cognition and Categorization.

The outcome of an interdisciplinary (i.e., psychology, linguistics, and anthropology)
conference, this book includes a range of perspectives on the principles of
categorization. The three sections cover real-world categories, the cognitive processes
underlying categorization, and the nature of representation.
RushkoK, Douglas. Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1996.
RushkoK examines the eKects that popular media have on us and the ways in which we
use media to inuence and manipulate.
. Playing the Future: How Kids Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of
Chaos. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
A fascinating perspective on youth culture from a member sitting on the edge. RushkoK
describes the lifestyles and thinking processes of todays children and teenagersor, as
he calls them screenagersand explains how they have not only adapted to, but
learned to thrive in the context of information explosion and media manipulation.
Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York:

Random House, 1995.
Sacks tells the stories of seven unique individuals, each of whom has a diKerent

neurological condition. (One of them is Temple Grandin, the autistic professor who told
him she feels like an anthropologist on Mars. See the bibliography entry by Grandin.)
Sacks narratives are based not only on clinical observations but also, and more
importantly, on his visiting and becoming friends with each of them.
Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in

Computers and People. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Based on his work in articial intelligence, Schank proposes a new theory of memory, a
dynamic memory, that applies to people as well as computers. He starts from the
question of why people are reminded of an old experience by a new one, then describes
the kind of memory organization they must have in order to be reminded. For a book
about memory, this one is most readable.
Simon, Lawrence. Cognition and AKect: A Developmental Psychology of the

Individual. BuKalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986.
In discussing the apparent wide fragmentation of personality theory, Simon puts forth
an argument for unifying disparate views. A broad range of earlier theories and works is
glued together to allow insights, followed by the introduction of Simons own
integrative theory: Cognitive-AKective-Developmental-Interpersonal theory (CADI).
Though he attempts to make one nal unifying theory of psychology, it doesnt stray too
far beyond earlier versions of related ideas of personality theory and development, and
is without heavy use of empirical research.
Solso, Robert L. Cognitive Psychology. Revised ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1995.
This is an updated version of the classic 1988 undergraduate textbook, now including
expanded coverage of physiologically related topics as well as an introduction to
connectionism and parallel distributed processing.
Suchman, Lucy A. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine

Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
One of the rst applied anthropologists to use ethnography in the study of man-
machine interaction, Suchman examines the interaction between novice users and an
intelligent machine, a copier. She argues persuasively for the need to take into account
the situatedness of most human social behavior.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Turkle explores the identity-transforming relationship between people and computers
that was taking place in the 1980s, before the pervasive impact of the internet. She
introduces the distinction between hard and soft styles of mastery over the computer.

. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995.
Turkle uses ethnographic and clinical observation approacheslistening to people
explain how they make sense of the internetin order to capture how the culture of
computer communication and simulation is aKecting our understanding of our minds
and our bodies. It is a timely integration of technology and sociology.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
The authors argue that it is only by having a sense of common ground between mind in
science and mind in experience that our understanding of cognition can become more
complete. They do so by blending insights from cognitive neuroscience with the
Buddhist theory of the mind.
Waltz, David, and Jerome A. Feldman. Connectionist Models and their

Implications: Readings from Cognitive Science. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988.
Connectionist models are based on the assumption that design constraints derived
from neurophysiological considerations may provide useful insights about certain
psychological phenomena. This collection of articles explores the application of
connectionist models to word perception, language production, and interpretation,
memory, learning, and concept formation.
Wanner, Eric, and Lila R. Gleitman, eds. Language Acquisition: The State of the
Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
This is a comprehensive overview of the eld of language development in the early
1980s, demonstrating the wide and often conicting range of theoretical perspectives
on this topic. The editors do a good job of identifying the emerging trends, both
theoretical and methodological.
Wechsler, Judith, ed. On Aesthetics in Science. Boston: Birkhauser, 1988.

Wechsler demonstrates, through a unique and eclectic collection of articles, that the
processes of invention and discovery in art and in science are not as diKerent as one
might have thought.
West, Thomas G. In the Minds Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Learning
Digculties, Computer Images, and the Ironies of Creativity. BuKalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1991.
West reports on the curious links between creative ability, visual thinking, and academic
learning digculties, proling eleven famous people who exhibited these connected
traits, including Einstein, Churchill, and Yeats. He describes opportunities for such
visual thinkers with the advent of the emerging computer visualization technologies.

Design Planning Bibliography
EWAN DUNCAN
The emerging eld of design planning integrates approaches from business strategy, social
science, research, and design prototyping. This bibliography represents theories from
these areas, emphasizing approaches required for breakthrough strategies and innovation.
top ten
Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovators Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause

Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.
A widely acclaimed book describing the dilemma at the core of successful customer-
focused businesses: that a companys best customers are often the people least likely to
quickly adopt radically new products or services. Thus Christensen draws the important
distinction between sustaining and disruptive innovations, and outlines (but never
details) ways to support diKerent forms of innovation and business development.
Deschamps, Jean-Philippe, and P. Ranganath Nayek. Product Juggernauts: How

Companies Mobilize to Generate a Stream of Market Winners. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1995.
A wide and varied collection of case studies from two Arthur D. Little consultants
outlining more systemic ways to reliably create successful new productsmost
revolving around new types of parallel development processes. Even with all the methods
and processes outlined, they admit true breakthroughs are part art, part science.
415
Hamel, Gary, and C. K. Prahalad. Competing for the Future: Breakthrough
Strategies for Seizing Control of Your Industry and Creating the Markets for
Tomorrow. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994.
In one of the most inuential books on strategic planning in the last ten years, Hamel and
Prahalad outline the need for more ambitious strategies in a time of increased change and
competition. As the most design-friendly strategy book around, it outlines a more proactive
approach to planning where you imagine the future and invent your way into it.
Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's
Leading Design Firm. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Written from inside the world's largest design rm, Kelley neatly summarizes the
approach IDEO takes to develop breakthrough products. It captures the underlying
methods, but a book can't fully capture the do-it, try-it, prototyping approach and
diverse personalities at the heart of the IDEO experience.
Mintzberg, Henry. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York: The Free
Press, 1994.
In this dense but thought-provoking review of the state of strategic planning, Mintzberg
highlights the diKerence between traditional numerical planning skills required in the
analysis of strategies and new types of synthetic skills required in the shaping of
emergent strategies and catalyzing on organization to take charge.
Olins, Wally. Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible through Design.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1989.
Olins presents a good introduction to corporate identity that highlights one of the key
issues many designers face: do great identities explain what a company is historically
known for, or do they explain what they should be creating in the future, and thus be
more aspirational and strategic in nature? Recent introductions like the British Airways
identity suggest the latter as a far better approach, not fully explored in this book.
Owen, Charles L. Design for Integrity. Chicago: Institute of Design

Communication Center, 1993.
One of the worlds leading design methods innovators summarizes the need forand
some practical applications ofmore systemic approaches to design. As the most
important and interesting problems continue to become more complex and far
outweigh traditional methods of development, this is becoming an increasingly
pressing issue for all forms of planning and design.
Rothschild, Michael. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. New York: John Macrae, 1992.
This lengthy tome was one of the rst to dene and promote the connection between
ecological theory and emerging economic behavior in new types of market andhe
hopesa massively deregulated, freer government. Rothschild practices what he preaches
as the head of the Bionomics Institute, an organization with planned obsolescence.

Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain
World. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1991.
A classic that outlines scenario-based planning as pioneered by Royal Dutch Shell in the
early 1970s and currently practiced by the eclectic Global Business Network, co-founded
by Schwartz. The book points out that it is impossible to predict the future, hence it is
better to be ready for multiple alternatives. A long view, but a short and quick read.
Ziesel, John. Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behavior Research. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
A comprehensive, accessible, and practical introduction on how to set up and interpret
design research, also containing a useful bibliography on other design and
environmental research books. It lacks only for ways to draw larger, more strategic
implications from research.
strategy basics
AnsoK, Igor. Corporate Strategy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

In what is considered a seminal work in the realm of strategy, AnsoK provides useful
historical background from one of the original books on strategic planning.
Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary
Companies. New York: Harper Business, 1994.
Based on extensive research done at Stanford, this book surprisingly highlights that
leaders are not one of the variables of longstanding companies, but rather persistence,
cultlike behavior, and big hairy audacious goals are. An interesting read to nd out
why some companies continue to stand out from the packalthough they remind us
that those companies were not always that way.
Gibson, Rowan, ed. Rethinking the Future. Sonoma, CA: Nicholas Brealay
Publishing, 1997.
A title with grandiose aspirations, this book captures the views of a gaggle of gurus. A
collection of summarized articles are followed by interviews with the authors ranging
from Michael Porter and John Kotter to Gary Hamel and Steven Covey. A good pointer
to more substantive work beyond, but lacking much of that detail here, it suKers most
by oKering few connections between the work.
Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of
Management Gurus. New York: Times Books, Random House, 1996.
Important parallel reading to Rethinking the Future, two Economist contributors wrote
this book to highlight some of the quirks and shortfalls of aimlessly following the latest
business trends and buzzwords. Recommended reading for any management consultant
or planner who wants to have longer-term impact, though the book does not go far
enough in oKering possible solutions.
DUNCAN: DESIGN PLANNING BIBLIOGRAPHY 417

Moore, James F. Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of
Business Ecosystems. New York: Harper Business, 1996.
As a wild comparison to Michael Porters Competitive Strategies, Moore takes you on a
tour of the planning jungle, exploring the latest buzz phrase to inltrate management
theory: ecological and biological theory. Metaphors aside, Moore presents some
progressive and thought-provoking ways to approach new products, services, and markets.
Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman, Jr. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from
Americas Best-Run Companies. New York: Warner Books, 1983.
Excellent companies . . . not! While many of the companies outlined have faltered since
the book was originally published, including HP, Delta Airlines, and McDonalds, this book
remains the most insightful Peters has written. His many more recent works have bridged
the diKerent aspects of design but tend to be vastly more supercial and whimsical.
Porter, Michael E. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and

Competitors. New York: The Free Press, 1980.
Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York:
The Free Press, 1985.
In these two seminal works on strategy, Porter eKectively outlines the Harvard Business
School approach to planning. These books are, by modern standards, overly
deterministic and static approaches to planning that do far more to place you in
todays markets than help you create new markets of tomorrow, but are far cheaper
than paying for a full Harvard MBAand maybe better value too.
Slywotzky, Adrian J. Value Migration: How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the
Competition. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
With traditional markets and channels breaking down, Slywotzky outlines new ways of
thinking about value that go way beyond traditional value chain analyses. The case
studies and analyses are a stimulating starter on the way to somewhere interesting in
the creation of new types of business models.
Treacy, Michael, and Fred Wiersema. The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose
Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market. Reading, MA:
Addison Wesley, 1995.
Treacy and Wiersema took some of their own advice too much to heart by buying
truckloads of their book and loading the best-seller list. Nevertheless, there are some
core insights in the book about diKerent ways to focus a company that remain useful.
organizing innovation
Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. New York: Harper Business, 1985.
The Yoda of management gurus, Drucker discusses how to foster innovation in large and
emerging companies. His list of four basic entrepreneurial strategies is even more

relevant today, highlighting the need to frame seemingly normal problems in new ways
to stretch greater innovation.
Leonard-Barton, Dorothy. Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the

Sources of Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
Proposing that experimentation and learning builds future success, Dorothy Leonard-
Barton highlights diKerent methods to foster better information and knowledge
transfer in the creation of new products. Noted for her work on empathic design,
she introduces the approach as a way to observe and design around user adaptations
of new products.
Nayak, P. Ranganath, and John M. Ketteringham, Breakthroughs: How Leadership

and Drive Create Commercial Innovations That Sweep the World. San Diego:
PfeiKer and Co., 1994.
Two Arthur D. Little consultants outline some of the more purposeful and systemic
methods to create breakthrough products and services. Ultimately, even they admit that
in an unpredictable world breakthroughs still require trial and enlightened observation,
as it rarely happens right the rst timeor in the same way each time.
Seely Brown, John, ed. Seeing DiKerently: Insights on Innovation. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1997.
If you dont want to pay the hefty subscription to the Harvard Business Review, this book
is the next best thing. This useful compendium brings together some of the most
thought-provoking and important articles recently published in the journal that outline
innovative approaches to business, technology, and economics.
Thomas, Robert J. New Product Success Stories: Lessons from Leading Innovators.
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.
A wonderful if sometimes supercial collection of case studies that prove how
diKerentand seemingly randomthe evolution of successful products is. Few robust
guidelines highlight any of the deep organizational structures and methods used to
foster them, but this book is a good starting place to understand the challenges of new
product development.
Von Hippel, Erik. The Sources of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press,
1988.
Von Hippel outlines the distributed innovation process and points out the seemingly
obvious fact that innovation occurs at the point of greatest benetoften the end or
lead users rather than the engineers or marketers who dreamt up the technology or
service in the rst place. A slightly technical book, it should oKer guidance to planners
about the origins of new ideas.

Zangwill, Willard. Lighting Strategies for Innovation: How the Worlds Best Firms
Create New Products. New York: Lexington Books, 1993.
Highlighting that the most innovative companies win in times of dramatic change and
competition, Zangwill makes a compelling case that you can never know enough about
customer behavior in these circumstances, so rapid learning and exibility should be
preferred over predetermined success. He goes on to outline both more and less
traditional ways to foster that culture within an organization.
integrating design and business
Blaich, Robert and Janet. Product Design and Corporate Strategy: Managing the
Connection for Competitive Advantage. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Robert Blaich, who introduced modern design management into Philips, details
approaches used there and in Herman Miller to link design processes with the rest of
the organization, and outlines general principles applicable elsewhere. While both main
examples remain design-friendly organizations, Philips has fared less well recently, as
often supercially applied design has done little to help the company substantively.
Farish, Mike. Strategies for World Class Products. Brookeld, VT: Gower
Publishing, 1995.
More organizational than Clive Rassams Design and Corporate Success, this book seems
to cover much of the same ground but is very technical and engineering-oriented,
lacking any insight about users and where new products come from or, more worryingly,
about diKerent ways to tailor them for diKerent cultures around the world. Useful
context and background, nonetheless.
International Design Conference in Aspen. The New Business of Design. New

York: Allworth Press, 1996.
From the annual and aging International Design Conference in Aspen, this book carries
transcripts from an eclectic collection of design-related speakers including John Kao of
Harvard Business School, Disney Imagineer Bran Ferrin, and Tom Peters, although his
freneticism doesnt carry over, which is a pity, as he is far more engaging on stage than
on paper.
Lorenz, Christopher. The Design Dimension: Product Strategy and the Challenge of
Global Marketing. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
In one of the classics of design strategy, Lorenz introduces some of the ways design can
work with marketing, but as a result this book lacks any real depth in how to truly
understand users and break out of the pack. It is, however, useful reading to understand
the way most people still think about design strategy.

Mok, Clement. Designing Business. San Jose, CA: Adobe Press, 1996.
A meticulously designed book from one of the most successful information designers-
turned-entrepreneurs today (Mok is the creative director of NetObjects, a company he
co-founded). While it gives a comprehensive view of the evolving role of information
design in the electronic and online world, it lacks the coverage of other elds of design
often required in truly integrated business strategies.
Rassam, Clive. Design and Corporate Success. Brookeld, VT: Gower Publishing,
1995.
Primarily covering product design and its role in successful companies (and countries),
this book is short and to the point. It introduces what design is, what it does, and how
to use it, without going into any real depth or detail. Part of a British Design Council
collection of books, most of the examples are British and European.
Thackara, John, ed. European Design Prize Winners! How Todays Successful
Companies Innovate by Design. Amsterdam: BIS Uitgeverij, 1997.
Design prizes are typically a terrible way of picking widespread innovations, but the
Netherlands Design Institute does a thorough and readable job of pacing recent, small-
scale design successes in cultural and technical contexts, highlighting some of the main
issues and theories shaping the eld of design today.
Walsh, Vivien, Robin Roy, Margaret Bruce, and Stephen Potter. Winning by
Design: Technology, Product Design and International Competitiveness.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Business, 1992.
Being both British and academic, this book is comprehensive and thoughtful but
ultimately a dull plea for the power of design in successful companies and economies,
supported by a multitude of charts and numbers.
understanding and addressing user needs
Adler, Paul S., and Terry A. Winograd. Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
With complex systems increasingly causing real danger to people, this sometimes dense
collection of case studies details ways that design theorists and practitioners approach
making products usable, including a Xerox case study that builds on Lucy Suchmans work.
Appdurai, Mrjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
This edited volume brings together a collection of case studies from diKerent cultural
and social contexts. By tracking the life cycle of commodity products, the authors each
attempt to understand how value, taste, and desire are constructedand what
diKerentiates a piece of junk from a valued antique.

Csikszentimihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New
York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Important for the ways it can be applied to creating meaningful customer experiences,
Csikszentimihalyis most accessible book introduces the idea of ow: optimal
experiences happen somewhere between those that fail to stimulate challenge and
those that are simply too much of a stretch to seem possible. Put another way, anything
worthwhile in life is worth working for.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of

In an academic and theoretical examination of the ways in which users really operate.
De Certeau challenges the notion that users are really passive consumers and attempts
to outline models of action based around evolving, interpretive behaviors: everyday life
invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.
Leavitt, Theodore. The Marketing Imagination. New York: The Free Press, 1983.
In this book from one of the grand pooh-bahs of marketing and a Harvard professor to
boot, Leavitt basically asks for a balance between innovation and imitation. Designers
tend to love the former, marketers ock to the latter, so both should end up happy.
Unfortunately, few designers or marketers understand this balance, and fewer still
recognize the increased need for innovation when markets are as ill-dened as they
have become since Leavitt wrote this book. Includes the classic Harvard Business Review
article Marketing Myopia.
McKenna, Regis. Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the Age of the
Consumer. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991.
The marketing guru who helped nurture the Apple Macintosh, Regis McKenna has
spent much of his life applying tried and tested marketing techniques to entirely new
markets. While the irony of this seems lost in most books, at least in the area of
individual marketing, McKenna appears here ahead of his time, but Don Peppers and
Martha Rogers seem to have stolen much of his wind with a more focused approach in
their The One to One Future.
Menzel, Peter, and Charles C. Mann. Material World: A Global Family Portrait.
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994.
An extensively researched and fantastically photographed book that literally turns
statistically average family homes from around the world onto the street and shows just
how much junk the American family has. Read this if you ever have a sense that families
around the world might be alike.
Michelson, William, ed. Behavioral Research in Environmental Design.

Stroudsburg, PA: Hutchison and Ross, 1975.
One of the early works explaining how to understand how people behave in physical

spaces and the implications it has on initial and ongoing environmental and interior
designs especially.
Moore, GeoKrey. Crossing the Chasm. New York: Harper Business, 1995.
. Into the Tornado. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
These books explode the traditional technology adoption model to propose that a huge
gap exists between the niche technology users of the early market and the initial users
of the later, mass market. Moore outlines ways to cross this gap in the rst book and
details the tornado of that transformation in the second. Generally useful reading from
the heart of Silicon Valley that should lead to focused initial uses for any planned
technology and far more widely applicable uses later.
Murphy, Robert Francis. The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in
Anthropological Theory. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
An irreverent, fun-to-read book that criticizes the tendency of anthropological and
other social science theories to model and organize the uidity of social life into rigidly
bounded categories. One of the few academic texts that uses the F word.
Norman, Donald A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the
Machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
A plea for a common-sense approach to the design of everyday items, these two books
set respective challenges for developers to make things rst simple and clear, then
allow people to modify open systems themselves. Judging by the growing weight of
user manuals the world over, most engineers still havent followed Normans advice.
Peppers, Don, and Martha Rogers, PhD. The One to One Future: Building
Relationships One Customer at a Time. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1993.
. Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Information Age. New
York: Currency Doubleday, 1997.
With the onset of extensive information technology, Peppers and Rogers highlight the
need for successful new products and services to be tailored to individual users. While the
implications of the approach raise many privacy issues, and careless application of the
technology too often leads to automation and voicemail hell, many of the examples in
these books show the power of intelligently and thoughtfully applied information systems.
Schuler, Douglas, and Aki Namioka. Participatory Design: Principles and

Practices. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993.
Drawing on extensive examples and foundations of the work in Scandinavia, this
collection of case studies shows the value of co-constructed innovations in the
development of complex systems. The general principle is applicable everywhere: often
the best ideas come from the ways people adapt systems in use.

Suchman, Lucy. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
From one of the pioneers in the use of behavioral observation from Xerox PARC, this
book is based on early work with photocopiers and argues that products are tools that
should not provide idiot-proof and rigid solutions, but should allow for constantly
reformulated possibilities.
Wiklund, Michael E., ed. Usability in Practice: How Companies Develop User-
Friendly Products. Cambridge, MA: AP Professional, 1994.
Another collection of case studies about usability, this book focuses primarily on
computer systems and a cognitive psychology approach to debugging them.
technology evolution
Braudel, Fernaud. Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible

(Civilization and Capitalism: 15th to the 18th Century). Berkeley: University of
Certainly not lacking for ambition, in the rst of a three-part volume of truly global
histories, Braudel integrates history, cultural anthropology, and contemporary
archeological work to detail how interrelated the world is. The notion that the world is a
global system is shown to be a matter of degree.
Casey, Steven. Set Phasers on Stun and Other Tales of Design, Technology and
Human Error. Santa Barbara: Aegean Publishing, 1993.
A collection of case studies that read like the typical disaster movie script, with multiple
innocuous actions cascading into widespread catastrophe. Casey highlights how bad
design can embed human error deep in complex systems. A good complement to
Donald Normans work, this is what happens if you truly screw up.
Corn, Joseph J., and Brian Horrigan. Yesterdays Tomorrows. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Referring to the assumption that nothing is truly new, the authors outline that created
futures tell you more about present beliefs and assumptions than they do about what
will happen next. Taken another way, however, with the right methods, it should be
possible to research patterns of everyday life today to understand what is most likely to
widely proliferate in the future. As Yogi Berra might say, prediction is hard, especially
when it is about the future.
Ferguson, Charles H., and Charles B. Morris. Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and
the Future of Global Technology. New York: Times Books, 1994.
Despite the recent resurgence of IBM, this book outlines some prescient approaches to
nding and fostering technology architectures that have long-lasting value. Ferguson
should know, having sold his subsequent company, Vermeer, to Microsoft in 1996 for a
tidy $120 million.

Lubar, Steven. Info Culture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions.
New York: Houghton Mihin, 1993.
This comprehensive historical textbook details many of todays important inventions
and their social consequences from deep in the industrial age to the current day,
illustrating the multitude of iterations before taking root in a culture.
MacKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wajcman. The Social Shaping of Technology: How
the Refrigerator Got its Hum. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1985.
This fascinating but hard-to-nd book describes some of the strange origins of
otherwise taken-for-granted aspects of new technology. It illustrates the need for
unique social hooks to get new technologies to take root in the culture.
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Everyday Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Author of other books on the role of failure in engineering design, Petroski details some
of the early iterations and dead-ends in the evolution of some of the common,
seemingly dull items that most people take for granted. The book oKers insight into the
long time it takes for winners to take nal shape.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic

Frontier. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
A quick read through the early life of online systems, Rheingolds book is important for
the widely applicable insight that people naturally group around areas of interest. With
increasing inuence online and elsewhere, these communities of interest are rapidly
achieving powerful social and commercial impactand oKering new ways to research
and support diKerent customer groups. Understanding that a new set of rules governs
this behavior, Rheingold goes as far as posting his book for free download on the web.
Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended
Consequences. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.
As technology is applied in more and more places, it makes peoples lives easier but
also makes them more complacent. Tenner uses an intriguing collection of case studies
to point out that technology doesnt make problems go away, it merely shifts them
somewhere else. Current design systems often fail to account for this in advance. The
book ultimately reinforces that the more we shape technology, the more technology
shapes us.
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of
High-Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
In this collection of essays, Winner outlines some of the societal and political
consequences of technology development that emerge from enduring but largely
unintended consequences of design decisions. Winner is one of the founding members
of the Science and Technology Studies program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

placing design in culture
Aldersley-Williams, High. World Design: Nationalism and Globalism in Design.

New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Dening global design as diverse, distinct national types over universal (American)
style, this book catalogues many of the major international manufacturers and
designers without addressing ways that designers can more deeply understand the
people who use products and the many cultural diKerences that exist around the world.
de Noblet, Jocelyn, ed. Industrial Design: Reections of a Century. Paris:

Flammarion/APCI, 1993.
From an exhibition of the same name in Paris in 1993, this extensive collaborative work
details the history and evolution of the industrial design eld over the course of a
century. Beautifully illustrated, it manages to balance images with thoughtful
commentary to help people understand the place of design in culture over the years.
Like many things French, this book is strong on design as air and amboyance, far
weaker on design as a strategic or systemic approach.
Domer, Peter. Design Since 1945. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
In the split between design as science and design as art, this book clearly falls closer to
the latter, but presents a readable introduction to many elds of design. It is helpful as
general background to the eld, but is dated in its prediction of the future of design
being ecologically driven.
Heskett, John. Industrial Design. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
In a thoughtful detailed history of the emergence and evolution of industrial design as
a eld from the early industrial revolution to more recent times, Heskett oKers useful
background about one of the closely related elds predating design planning.
Tambini, Michael. The Look of the Century. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1997.
An excellent visual dictionary of major cultural artifacts, this is a fantastic resource but
ultimately a very light read. Like many other Dorling Kindersley books, this is an
immaculately constructed visual exploration of designed objects over the years.
systematizing change
Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

A classic in the design eld that discusses the deep interrelationship between the way a
problem is framed and the process and solution to that problem. An architect by
training, Alexander is widely noted for his work in formalizing the underlying,
repeatable systems and patterns that support most design processes and highlighting
the need for more rigorous methods to address complex problems.

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern
Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
This dense work lays the foundation for many rule-based design processes and systems,
such as Seaside in Florida. While the book is focused on the physical systems and forms
that arise, the underlying principles are equally relevant and applicable to many types
of organizational and electronic system design.
Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn. New York: Viking, 1994.

Understanding that nothing is ever designed as a static solution, this book meticulously
details the rich patina of use that grows after a building is designed and built. One of
the co-founders of the Well and the Global Business Network, Brand highlights some of
the deciencies in modern architecture and goes to show that in many cases, usage is
design, which can be better supported through open design systems.
Hollins, Bill, and Stuart Pugh. Successful Product Design. London: Butterworths,
1990.
This engineering- and manufacturing-driven design book nonetheless oKers insights in
one approach toward a more rigorous, systemic approach to designing new products.
Pugh is one of the pioneers in formalizing parts of the design process, including the
product design specication.
Mitchell, C. Thomas. Redening Design: From Form to Experience. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1993.
The core insight is captured clearly in the title: user needs are central to emergent types
of design when creating a compelling experience, as opposed to the next whizzy
gadget. Mitchell outlines an interesting collection of experience designers, from Brian
Eno to Christo, exploding the notion of design wide open.
Norman, Donald A., and Stephen W. Draper, eds. User-centered Systems Design.
Somewhat before its time, this book outlines approaches and generalizable design
principles derived from hardware and software computer systems design, albeit in a
jargony way, which seems somewhat ironic given its title.
Simon, Herbert A. The Sciences of the Articial, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1981.
A work that seems to be more relevant today than ever, this important book makes a
good complement to Christopher Alexanders work. Introducing the idea that the
complexity of individual actions is representative of the deep underlying complexity of
larger organizations, Simon oKers thoughts to why people subsequently take the rst,
easiest choice, rather than the rationalized, best choice.

Wareld, John N. A Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through
Systems Design. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990.
A dense and sometimes undecipherable book, its core insight is that a general systems
theory is required for designing increasingly complex systems. This could have been
outlined in far fewer words; its a pity that the approach described seems lacking in
practical outcomes.
alternative business models
Anderson, Philip, Kenneth J. Arrow, and David Pines, eds. The Economy as an
Evolving Complex System. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988.
A collection of early case studies on the application of complexity theory to economics,
this book highlights some of the deep aws in traditional deterministic and empirical
economic modeling that point to the need for new ways to model emergent economic
behavior and new types of business models.
Arthur, W. Brian. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy

(Economics, Cognition and Society). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Recently popularized in the success of Intel, Microsoft, and a few other lucky (and well-
run) companies, Arthur details some of the underlying theory of path dependence
the behaviors that occur when QWERTY, Windows, and other dominant standards take
hold. He unfortunately does little to explain why seemingly inferior solutions win or
how you can create the next winnerat least he hasnt told us about it yet. Most of the
book is highly theoretical, but the rst chapter should be widely accessible.
Epstein, Richard. Simple Rules for a Complex World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Making a strong case for deregulation and open systems, Epstein illustrates the
underlying belief that it is far more eKective to create a few basic rules to guide
intelligent people than to try to micromanage their preferred behavior. Alluding to a
general distrust of large institutions, Epstein bravely puts his theory to test in six
general rules that he persuasively claims could make much of the government and the
legal profession irrelevant. Who could argue?
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Exploring the role of neobiological systems and principles through a fascinating
collection of stories, this highly acclaimed book from the executive director of Wired
highlights the rich applicability of emergent behaviors and strategies. The ocking, or
hivemind behaviors described in the book seem to have induced similar behaviors in
response, with a massive number of books, conferences, and articles following Kellys lead.

Waldrop, Michael. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and
Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
This book details some of the background of the Santa Fe Institute, one of the pioneers
of the emerging eld of complexity theory and its application to other areas. Of special
note is the connection to emerging economic theory, through the work of Brian Arthur.
While not the theory of everything it was hailed to be in the late 80s, complexity
theory has widespread implications for a large number of areas today, including
decentralized strategy and IT support systems.
communicating change and complexit y
Mollerup, Per. Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks.

London: Phaidon, 1997.
A catalogue of graphic detail, this heavy tome presents a comprehensive study of the
evolution and use of trademarks by modern corporations. Beautifully researched and
designed, it does little to oKer insight into the new types of methods and possibilities
that are now emerging in more vibrant, dynamic identities.
Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT:

Graphics Press, 1983.
. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990.
. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.
Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.
Recognizing the importance of clear and understandable information design, this series
of books explores in fascinating detail the best use of information design in diKerent
dimensions, respectively: numbers; numbers and space; and numbers, space, and time.
Whitney, Patrick, and Cheryl Kent, eds. Design in the Information Environment:
How Computing Is Changing the Problems, Processes and Theories of Design. New
York: Knopf, 1985.
An early book on the impact of computers on design, the insights presented here
remain prescient today. A number of the contributors are collaborators of the Institute
of Design, including Jay Doblin, the founder of the eld of design planning.
changing organizational behavior
Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith. The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the
High Performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991.
An easy and practical read from two McKinsey consultants that outlines the power of
intelligently created and applied teams based on extensive research of best practices at
a number of successful companies. With the almost universal need for multi-disciplinary
teams in most developmental situations, the insights in this book are generally relevant
and helpful.

Nadler, David A., Marc S. Gerstein, and Robert B. Shaw. Organizational Architecture,
Designs for Changing Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1992.
This book highlights the need for new types of organizational design in an increasingly
networked world. The rst chapter may be of particular interest, drawing parallels
between architectural design and physical space and the design and behavior of
organizations. The authors are partners at Delta Consulting, one of the worlds leading
organizational change companies.
Pascale, Richard T. Managing on the Edge. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
This book oKers useful insights about how strategies, and particularly organizations,
need to change in a period of time compression, when everything must be done not
only faster but better as well. The author, a noted expert from the human potential
movement and one of the developers of the theory behind McKinseys famous Seven
Ss, consistently oKers practical insights that thoughtful people will nd essential for
lessening trauma in times of intense change.
Schrage, Michael. Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. New

York: Random House, 1990.
This book outlines the shift from communication to collaboration as a base
organizational activity and oKers examples of the many emerging technologies and
tools that are allowing it to happen in richer, more rapid, and more interesting ways
than ever before.

Education and Learning Theory
Bibliography
MEREDITH DAVIS
This bibliography covers a range of topics, from research on teaching and learning
through design experience in K12 classrooms to the application of learning theory to
design problem solving in a broad range of contexts. In references that support pedagogical
research in the application of design thinking and concepts to K12 classrooms, the goal
is to enhance learning and teaching in all subjects, not to provide pre-professional or
vocational training in design. Emphasis is placed on the consistency between what is
called for in national education reform initiatives and the learning outcomes of a design
education. In the selection of references on learning theory and cognition, there is an
assumption that preferences for ways to learn are congruent with preferences for
ways to access information. Therefore, the concepts explored in these books have
direct implications for the design of information in any context or for any audience.
educating reform
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Project 2061,

Benchmarks for Science Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
This study describes the role of science and technology in addressing the radical
changes expected within the next human life span. It also proposes what the substances
and character of an education designed to meet those challenges will be. More forward-
thinking and demanding of creativity than the National Standard for Art Education, this
publication serves as an innovative road map for those wishing to build a case for the
use of design in mainstream instruction. The sections on technology are especially
relevant to product design. The publication also provides ample justication for future
research into appropriate pedagogies for delivering such an education.
431
Center for Civic Education. National Standards for Civics and Government.
Calabasas, CA: Center for Civic Education, 1993.
These standards call for increased involvement of students in the social and political
processes of their communities. A good argument for the adoption of curricula that
include design experiences in which children analyze real problems and propose
solutions. The standards hold particular signicance for architects and environmental
designers with an interest in pedagogical structures of K12 classrooms.
Consortium of National Art Education Associations. National Standards for Art

Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able to Do in the
Arts. Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference, 1994.
Disappointingly, these standards describing what every child should know and be able to do
in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts intentionally avoid descriptions that relate to
design. The authors viewed design as simply another sub-specialty of the visual arts, not as a
process with specic thinking skills or content that diKer from the ne arts. The subsequent
framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts attempted to
address these diKerences by including specic performance standards for design.
Holmes Group. Tomorrows Schools of Education. East Lansing, MI: Holmes

Group, 1995.
The Holmes Group, a consortium of universities doing educational research and educator
preparation, published this self-critical report on higher education that calls for educators
to adopt the reforms that link their education contributions closely with improved
schooling . . . or surrender their franchise. The reforms cited as necessary in teacher
preparation argue in favor of exposing college education majors to experiences much
like those of design students. This publication is excellent background reading for those
who wish to build strong alliances between schools of education and schools of design.
National Assessment Governing Board. NAEP Arts Education Consensus Project,

Arts Education Assessment Framework. Washington, D.C.: Chief State School
Ogcers with the College Board and the Council for Basic Education, 1994.
This is the rst U.S. performance-based assessment of the visual arts (in which students
actually make art and solve design problems) in twenty years, and the rst to include
design as a discrete area of performance. The framework outlines the content and
achievement standards against which the national assessment was developed. While
the nal test suKers from the inevitable tradeoKs in mounting a national exam for more
than 40,000 students, the framework is a useful articulation of what students should
know and be able to do in design.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative

for Educational Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ogce, 1983.
This landmark report launched the U.S. on its quest for educational reform. Highly
critical of what American children know and are able to do, the report serves as a
benchmark for the reform movement.

National Council for the Social Studies. Expectations of Excellence, Curriculum
Standards for Social Studies. Washington, DC: National Council for the Social
Studies, 1994.
These national standards for social studies include frequent reference to student
prociency in creating graphic communications and learning to derive and analyze
information from maps, charts, tables, and other graphic information.
National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association.

Standards for the English Language Arts. Urbana, IL, and Newark, DE: National
Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association, 1996.
Although some of the more obvious connections to design were lost between early
versions and the nal draft, these standards clearly advocate children learning to read
visual information (maps, charts, diagrams) as well as the written word. Further, the
authors seem to see a connection between imaginative writing and thinking visually.
National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences. National Science

Education Standards. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996.
As in other subject areas, these standards were dened for grades K12 through a
national consensus-building process. They represent signicant change toward the
perception of science education as creative problem-solving and application. The
section on technology education encourages designing as well as using technology. The
word design appears throughout these standards.
New Standards Project. Performance Standards in English, Language Arts,

Mathematics, Sciences, and Applied Learning. Washington, DC: National Center
on Education and the Economy, 1997.
Led by Lauren Resnick at the Learning Research and Development Center of the
University of Pittsburgh, the New Standards Project attempts to build an assessment
system to measure student progress in meeting national content and performance
standards in various subject areas. Of special interest to designers is a non-disciplinary
category of standards titled Applied Learning that cites skills and knowledge common
to design and that assesses student performance through design tasks.
United States Department of Labor, The Secretarys Commission on Achieving

Necessary Skills. Skills and Tasks for Jobs: A SCANS Report for America 2000.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ogce, 1992.
This report cites the key worker competencies, skills, and qualities necessary in the
workforce of the next century. These competencies and thinking skills bear striking
resemblance to the learning outcomes of a design education (problem solving, creative
thinking, seeing things in the minds eye, understanding systems, interpreting and
communicating information, etc.) and argue eKectively for the inclusion of design-
based instruction in all schools.
DAV I S : E D U C AT I O N A N D L E A R N I N G T H E O RY B I B L I O G R A P H Y 433
teaching and learning through design
Archer, Bruce, Ken Baynes, and Phil Roberts. The Nature of Research into Design
and Technology Education. Loughborough, England: Loughborough University, 1992.
These pioneers in the eKort to establish design and technology as components of the
national curriculum in the U.K. analyze how children think as designers and the
implications for curriculum and pedagogy. After a decade of curriculum implementation
and assessment, the U.K. provides the most comprehensive study of this subject, and
these three authors are among the most active researchers.
Bottrill, Pauline. Designing and Learning in the Elementary School. Reston, VA:
International Technology Education Association, 1995.
The often confusing denitions of technology education become more clear in this
book. Neither about learning computer software nor the old industrial arts model we
associate with building exercises that acquaint students with power tools, this book
describes an education in which invention and problem-solving are paramount.
Aesthetics or style receive little attention in this discussion; however, the t between
form and function is made clear.
Burnette, Charles, and Jan Norman. DK12: Design for Thinking. Tucson: Crizmac,
1997.
Burnette, an industrial design professor, and Norman, his University of the Arts colleague
in Art and Museum Education, have developed a description of how the design process
works that can be used in K12 classrooms. Their methods have been tested in schools and
in college-level classes for art teachers and designers who hope to work in K12 curricula.
Davis, Meredith, Peter Hawley, Bernard McMullan, and Gertrude Spilka. Design
as a Catalyst for Learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development, 1997.
A report of a two-year study by the National Endowment for the Arts on the use of
design in K12 classrooms, this book explains the thirty-year history of designed-based
education, the relationship between design-based teaching and learning strategies and
the goals of education reform, and case studies from 170 elementary and secondary
teachers in all subject areas.
Dunn, Susan, and Rob Larson. Design Technology: Childrens Engineering. Bristol,
PA: Falmer Press, 1990.
The authors present a compelling case for having children design technology, even in
the primary grades. Their ideas are given weight by their highly successful work in using
technology as the curricular core in the Oregon elementary schools where Dunn is and
has been a principal.

Edwards, Carolyn, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, eds. The Hundred
Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993.
The Reggio Emilia schools in Italy use design and creative activities as the core of early
childhood education. These programs have been the source of much study and the basis
of traveling exhibits in the U.S.
Eggleston, John. Teaching Design and Technology. Philadelphia: Open University

Press, 1996.
A university professor of education, Eggleston has written a guidebook to curriculum
development and instruction in design and technology. To American designers, the
denitions of design and technology seem more arts-and-crafts-based than in the
U.S. and share much with what we once called industrial arts. But this book presents
valuable lessons in articulating the t between such hands-on instruction and other
aspects of curriculum.
Farrell, Alir, and Jim Patterson. Understanding Assessment in Design and Technology.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993.
Written by the Technology Education Research Unit (TERU) at the University of London,
this book provides a basic structure for developing assessments of design and
technology. The framework is probably most eKective for work with young children.
Graves, Ginny. Walk Around the Block. Prairie Village, KS: Center for
Understanding the Built Environment, 1997.
Known for her work in K12 education, Graves provides project examples that
encourage student exploration of the built environment.
Hyerle, David. Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge. Alexandria, VA:

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996.
Hyerle illustrates the use of brainstorming webs, task-specic organizers, and thinking
process maps in organizing and communicating information in learning contexts. The
authors visual techniques are as useful in design planning as they are in educational
tasks and, therefore, could be applied in introductory college-level design classes.
Kimbell, Richard, Kay Stables, and Richard Green. Understanding Practice in

Design and Technology. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996.
Kimbell heads a research unit at Goldsmiths College/University of London that studies
the ways designers think and the implications for education. Using the design process
as a methodological model for exible and creative thinking, Kimbell and colleagues
present teaching approaches to science and technology that accommodate diKerences
among learners and that encourage high levels of student motivation.
Nelson, Doreen. Manual for City Building Education Project. Los Angeles: Center
for City Building Education Programs, 1982.
Nelson, a college professor in elementary education, is among the early proponents of
using environmental design activities to teach creativity and design thinking to young
children. Her City Building Education Project is well known here and abroad, and she was
a consultant on the development of SimCity, popular software in which users make
choices about the design of cities.
. Transformations: Process and Theory. Los Angeles: Center for Building

Education Programs, 1984.
More extensive than Manual for City Building Education Project, this book explores
Nelsons hands-on methods and the theory of using design as a way to develop
students creative thinking and group problem solving.
Raizen, Senta, Peter Sellwood, Ron Todd, and Margaret Vickers. Technology
Education in the Classroom: Understanding the Designed World. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1995.
A report by the National Center for Improving Science Education, this book conrms
the need for technology education through analysis of current educational practice in
the U.S. Citing obstacles to broader application in American schools, the authors
articulate a vision for curriculum and teaching strategies that involve technology. An
appendix provides summary descriptions of technology education in various countries.
Royal College of Art. Design in General Education: Part One; Summary of Findings
and Recommendations. London: Royal College of Art, 1976.
This landmark study favored the inclusion of design in the national curriculum in Great
Britain and resulted in later legislation that established design and technology
instruction in all schools. It successfully argues that design experiences provide
learning opportunities critical to the achievement of necessary skills.
Salvadori, Mario. Architecture and Engineering: An Illustrated Teachers Manual on

Why Buildings Stand Up. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1993.
One of several books by Salvadori, this one describes the principles of architecture in
ways that are directly applicable to science, mathematics, and technology instruction.
Simple diagrams explain complex concepts. As in its counterpart, Why Buildings Fall
Down: Structure in Architecture, such explanations are the basis of Salvadoris successful
instruction at the Center for Built Environment Education.
Slafer, Anna, and Kevin Cahill. Why Design?. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1995.
Based on projects from Design Wise, the National Building Museums summer design
curriculum for high school students, this book includes project descriptions that cross
design disciplines and can be adapted to classrooms.

Taylor, Anne. Architecture and Children: Learning by Design, Teachers Guide and
Poster Sets. Albuquerque: American Institute of Architects, 1992.
University of New Mexico architecture professor Taylor is well-known for her
Architecture and Children program. This collection of materials denes the program
and projects that acquaint students with concepts related to the built environment.
Decidedly architectural in its orientation, there is little investigation of the product or
graphic design concepts that also dene the built environment.
Thistlewood, David, ed. Issues in Design Education. New York: Longman, 1990.
This collection of essays from mostly British researchers and design educators explores
what we mean by design, dening the place of design in curriculum, and the role of
making in education.
Welch, Polly, ed. Strategies for Teaching Universal Design. Boston: Adaptive
Environments Center, 1995.
Written to inform the development of college-level design curricula, this book proves
an excellent resource for introducing students of all ages to problem-solving that
addresses a full range of user needs. Despite far-reaching civil rights laws, schools seem
unaware of the relationship between design and inclusiveness. Conceived as
curriculum interventions, the strategies in this book seem as appropriate for
discussion and implementation in K12 classrooms as in college design studios.
curriculum development, pedagogy, and assessment
Boughton, Doug, Elliot Eisner, and Johan Ligtvoet. Evaluating and Assessing the
Visual Arts in Education: International Perspectives. New York: Teachers College
Press, 1996.
A compilation of viewpoints about assessment strategies, this book provides useful
information in an area most designers and artists avoid in the belief that creativity
cannot be evaluated authentically.
Brooks, Martin, and Jacqueline Brooks. In Search of Understanding: The Case for
Constructivist Classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development, 1993.
This book describes the current thinking about interactive, integrated curriculum
experiences through which children construct knowledge and meaning. This is in
opposition to the commonly used strategies of telling students what information means
through lectures and textbooks. For designers, this theory holds some relevance for
developing communication strategies through which individuals must acquire new
knowledge and form opinions.
De Bono, Edward. De Bonos Thinking Course. New York: Facts on File
Publications, 1985.
The author describes this book as concerned with thinking that makes for wisdom
rather than the sort that makes for cleverness. It is a collection of techniques that
develop lateral thinking abilities and that account for feelings and values.
. New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas. New
York, Basic Books, 1967.
De Bono discusses the diKerence between vertical thinking (high probability, straight-
ahead) and lateral thinking (low probability, sideways) and the value of searching for
more than one solution to problems. De Bonos thinking strategies have value in
education as well as in design practice, and this is one of his many books that address
these issues.
Gordon, William J. J. The Metaphorical Way of Knowing and Learning. Cambridge,

MA: Porpoise Books, 1973.
Easier to read than Gordons Synectics, this book uses case studies to illustrate the use
of analogy in problem solving and in teaching complex ideas and relationships.
Examples are applicable to corporate as well as educational settings and especially
useful in discussing ways of presenting unfamiliar concepts to anyone.
Jacobs, Heidi Hayes. Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation.

Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1989.
Jacobs is a leading proponent of interdisciplinary curricula. In this book she warns
against supercial investigations that are constructed for the sake of interdisciplinarity
alone. She further explains the value of the disciplines to interdisciplinary study while
advocating for connected experiences that resemble the integrated problem-solving
demands of adult work.
Kimbell, Richard, Kay Stables, Tony Wheeler, Andrew Wosniak, and Vic Kelly.
The Assessment of Performance in Design and Technology. London: School
Examinations and Assessment Council, 1993.
A summary of the assessment of the rst ten years of the design and technology
curriculum in British schools, this report provides credible evidence that design learning
can be assessed in ways that are convincing to school administrators and the public. The
book includes ample test exercises as well as a complete explanation of rubrics and
testing strategies.
Perkins, David. Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child. New
York: Free Press, 1992.
In this book Perkins describes smart schools as informed, energetic, and thinking-
centered. He dissects what is really meant by understanding and tackles the issues of
metacurriculum and distributed intelligence (which runs counter to the emphasis on

solo performance in most classrooms). Perkinss description of the smart school is not
far from the contemporary practice of strategic design.
Perkins, David, Raymond Nickerson, and Edward E. Smith. The Teaching of

Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985.
Perkins and his co-authors cover various perspectives on the nature of thinking as well
as practical ways to teach thinking. In a section on problem-solving, creativity, and
metacognition (thinking about thinking), the authors describe some creative vs.
noncreative patterns of thinking as habits of information processing, not ability. In later
chapters, the book cites specic studies and methods for the teaching of thinking.
Wolf, Dennie Palmer. Performance-Based Student Assessment: Challenges and

Possibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Director of a Harvard University research unit on performance-based assessment, Wolf
builds her views on assessment from research in classrooms and schools across the
country. She is a strong proponent of portfolio assessment and evaluation that concerns
itself more with student improvement than with reporting.
cognition and learning theory
Ackerman, Phillip L., Robert J. Sternberg, and Robert Glaser. Learning and
Individual DiKerences: Advances in Theory and Research. New York: W. H.
Freeman and Co., 1989.
A compilation of essays by various researchers, this text looks at how individuals diKer
in their abilities and preferences for learning and how such diKerences are measured.
Several taxonomies of learning skills are oKered and can serve as checklists for
designers who care about being inclusive in their structuring and representation of
information. Of special interest to designers are discussions of testing associational
uency, visual matching, space relations, visual scanning, design memory (visualizing
steps in drawing a gure) visual constancy (visualizing alternate positions of the same
object), and Gestalt closure. Several of the essays require some skill at reading
statistical outcomes from psychological tests.
Augoustinos, Martha, and Iain Walker. Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction.

London: Sage Publications, 1995.
A comprehensive survey of research in social cognition, this book examines theories of
information processing with special attention to content and context. Covering topics
such as attitudes, schemas, social representations, and stereotyping, the authors
provide both theories and applications. The book is helpful in understanding the origins
of attitudes and behavior that must be taken into account for successful
communication. The citations are useful in developing a more complete bibliography on
the topic and in nding seminal research.
Baron, Joan BoykoK, and Robert J. Sternberg, eds. Teaching Thinking Skills. New
York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1987.
This collection of essays by various authors is helpful in understanding the development
of critical-thinking skills in students (including college students trying design). Several
essays propose taxonomies of thinking that guide strategies for structuring information
in learning contexts. For designers who are as engaged in the authoring and ordering of
content in complex learning situations as they are in its form, these are useful
frameworks for analyzing possible learning outcomes.
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Having launched a cognitive revolution in the mid-1950s, Bruner continues his interest
in what he calls folk psychology, an alternative to the computational models of
thinking so prevalent in the eld. This book makes a strong case for our cognitive
predisposition to narrative, to understanding and explaining the world through
storytelling. Bruner describes negotiating and renegotiating meanings by the mediation
of narrative interpretation and the tool kit of interpretive techniques passed on
through culture. He traces the entry into meaning of young children and rmly
establishes the importance of narrative to cognitive development.
. On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962.
Referring to the powers of intuition and emotion in the title, Bruner describes how we
construct reality and how the act of knowing results in language, literature, and art. In
later chapters, Bruner connects these ideas to teaching.
Bruner, Jerome, Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and George A. Austin. A Study of

Thinking. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990.
There is consensus among historians that this book, originally published in 1956, marked
the birth of contemporary cognitive science and a signicant break with the
computational models of thinking. The book describes the task of isolating and using
concepts, the relationship of concept acquisition to adapting to environment, and
experiments in categorization and concept attainment.
Cole, Michael. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge,

MA: Belknap Press, 1996.
A cursory history of the discipline of psychology, this book ends with Coles position
that mediation through culture is the special characteristic of human thought. In one
chapter, Cole illustrates how his theories can be used to construct educational
activities. This book is helpful in describing methodology for studying
cultural/psychological phenomena.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in

Work and Games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975.
Building on his notion of ow (described below), the author breaks down the roots of

enjoyment and intrinsic motivation. This work can inform designers development of
communication and product strategies, in which learning is a critical component.
. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row,
1990.
The author explains the characteristics of ow, a mental state in which concentration
is so directed that there are no distractions from the task, and the experience is so
gratifying that we do it for its own sake. In analyzing how such optimal experience is
achieved, Csikszentmihalyi oKers valuable models for designing educational and work
experiences.
Eisner, Elliot, ed., and the National Society for the Study of Education. Learning
and Teaching the Ways of Knowing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
A collection of essays by important scholars such as Eisner, Rudolf Arnheim, Jerome Bruner,
Robert Sternberg, and Michael Cole, this book examines models of knowing and the
implications of educational practice. While the focus of the book is on reforming curriculum
and instruction, the essays provide insight into how people learn in contexts other than
school and relevant diKerences that could shape the presentation of information.
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York:
Basic Books, 1983.
In this book Gardner introduces his theory of multiple intelligences, describing linguistic,
musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal, and the spectrum
of intelligences found in any individual. Gardner uses this analytical framework to explain
why certain contemporary educational eKorts have achieved success while others have
not. For designers, Gardners isolation of these distinct domains raises questions about
exclusively linguistic or visual strategies for presenting information.
. Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Gardners much-heralded theory of multiple intelligences (rst described in Frames of
Mind in 1983) receives a more practice-oriented treatment in this edition. Convinced
that an intelligence can serve as both the content of instruction and the means or medium
for communicating that content, Gardner conrms what designers already know: that
we can know something through cognitive experiences that have their basis in sound,
space, and movement as well as in words and numbers. For designers, this can provide
insight into possible points of audience entry into unfamiliar subject matter.
Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995.
A professor of English at Vassar and hypertext novelist, Joyce discusses new issues in
writing and the teaching of writing raised by electronic technology. The author
describes a shift in human consciousness in which readers choose both the order and
form of what they read. For designers, this book raises questions about the structure of
information and traditional formats, such as books and lm.
LakoK, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about
the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
In a discussion of our conceptual system and how it is organized, the author suggests
that we make sense of our experience by a process called categorization, in which we
group concepts according to shared properties. Among others, LakoK cites the work of
Eleanor Rosch and the notion of prototypes (best examples of a category). This work
provides insight for the selection of objects, places, events, and words to represent
ideas and emotions in visual communication.
LakoK, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
The authors believe metaphors are the key to explaining how we understand the world
and are more than poetic form and instruments of language. They suggest that our
conceptual system is largely metaphorical and that metaphors actually structure our
behavior and actions as well as our thought. Early chapters provide clear denitions of
types of metaphors, while later chapters discuss how they work in culture and in
shaping experience. This reading can guide the selection of metaphorical forms used to
express meaning in visual communication.
Laurel, Brenda. Computer as Theatre. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991.

Trained in theatre, Laurel makes a strong case for using design principles for human-
computer activity that have their roots in the performing arts and narrative. This is a
refreshing discussion in the sea of writing about information architecture coming from
computer scientists and organizational psychologists.
Lumsdaine, Edward and Monika. Creative Problem-solving: Thinking Skills for a

Changing World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
Written to persuade engineers about the value of creative thinking to problem-solving
and business, most of this book is old news to designers. However, the chapter on
cognitive styles is succinct in its summary of the work of Ned Hermann, David Kolb, and
Bernice McCarthy, who provide useful descriptions of how audiences may diKer in their
preferences for thinking and ways of accessing information. It also raises important
questions about the nature of teamwork that positively supports such cognitive
preferences and abilities.
McCarthy, Bernice. The 4MAT System: Teaching to Learning Styles with Left/Right
Mode Techniques. South Barrington, IL: EXCEL Publishing, 1987.
Written like a primer, this work is deceptively simple but builds on important learning
theory research by David Kolb. The text is part of an overall testing system for
determining how individuals prefer to perceive and process information.
Kolbs/McCarthys discussions of problem-solving vs. problem-seeking and their

descriptions of four learning types hold signicance for designers in the choice of
representational strategies and for design educators in explaining diKerences of
approach and critical opinion among design students.
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things (formerly The Psychology of

Everyday Things). New York: Doubleday, 1988.
This is a highly readable critique of the dysfunctional design of everyday products.
Norman points out the mist between how people think and behave and the design of
common objects and environments. This is a good reminder that the criteria driving
contemporary design are not always related to use.
. Things That Make Us Smart. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993.

In his conventional style, Norman describes types of cognition and the importance of
representation. In particular, this book challenges representational strategies used in
the design of new media.
Ortony, Andrew, ed. Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge
Ortony, faculty fellow in the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University,
has put together a collection of essays on the relationship between metaphor and
meaning, representation, understanding, science, and education. As designers and
educators frequently communicate through visual and linguistic analogies, this book
oKers valuable insights into how metaphors shape human thought and can guide our
selection and understanding of representational form.
Perkins, David. Knowledge as Design. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, 1986.
Co-director of Project Zero at Harvard University, Perkins writes on the development of
thinking skills. In this volume, he emphasizes the diKerence between knowledge as
information and knowledge as design, a structure adapted to a purpose. The book
ranges across subjects such as problem-nding, the value of models to thinking, and
argument. For designers, Perkinss language provides comforting descriptions of
experiences we have all had.
. The Minds Best Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
A combination of theory, examples, and thought problems, this book examines the
nature of invention and creative and critical thought. Perkins uses the creative lives of
accomplished people from the arts and sciences to illustrate his points and then goes
on to recommend teaching strategies that support creative thinking.
Ryan, R. M., J. P. Connell, and E. L. Deci. Research on Motivation in Education:
The Classroom Milieu, vol. 2. Ed. Carole Ames and Russell Ames. New York:
Academic Press, 1995.
In this discussion of self-determination and self-regulation in education, the authors
ndings support the notion that motivation in a learning situation will be higher when
the individual maintains some control about what is learned and how it is learned. For
designers, this raises questions about linear, author/designer-controlled presentations
of information.
Snow, Richard E., and Marshall J. Farr, eds. Aptitude, Learning, and Instruction
Volume 3: Cognitive and AKective Process Analyses. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Subjects range from intelligence and cognitive style to thinking about feelings and
motivation. Of special interest is a discussion of the heuristics for designing intrinsically
motivating learning environments.
Sternberg, Robert J., ed. Handbook of Human Intelligence. New York: Cambridge
This tome of essays covers the theories on the nature of intelligence, learning, memory,
reasoning and problem-solving, and culture and intelligence. It is a good place to start if
you are trying to determine the range of issues on the subject of intelligence.
Sternberg, Robert J., and Richard K. Wagener, eds. Mind in Context. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
The preface to this collection of essays states that the editors tried to bridge the gap
between constructivists, who believe all cognition depends on interaction with the
outside world, and the traditional point of view that all cognition resides in the mind.
Sternbergs own essay oKers a model of person-context interaction and situated
learning (and work) that is especially relevant to designers. Other essays address the
concept of distributed intelligence.
Wurman, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Wurmans book makes a strong case for making information understandable at all costs.
Especially useful in talking with students about the design of information are the
sections on the ve rings of information (sources of information) and ways of
organizing information.

interdisciplinary bibliography
for design researchers
architec ture
Jones, John Chris. Design Methods. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992.
Nesbitt, Kate, ed. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural
Theory 19651995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
Sommer, Robert. Social Design: Creating Buildings with People in Mind. Englewood CliKs:
Prentice-Hall, 1983.
communication
Barnum, Carol M., and Saul Carliner, eds. Techniques for Technical Communicators. New
York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993.
Bugeja, Michael. Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Coe, Marlana. Human Factors for Technical Communicators. New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1996.
Floreak, Michael J. 1989. Designing for the Real World: Using Research to Turn a Target
Audience into Real People. Technical Communication 36: 37381.
Frey, Lawrence R., et al. Investigating Communication: An Introduction to Research
Methods. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991.
Kostelnick, Charles, and David D. Roberts. Designing Visual Language: Strategies for
Professional Communicators. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold Publishers, 2001.
445
Odell, Lee, and Susan Katz. Writing in a Visual Age. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005.
Pearce, W. Barnett. Communication, Action and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities.
New York: Praeger, 1980.
Rogers, Everett M. A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach. New
York: The Free Press, 1994.
Rottenberg, Annette T. Elements of Argument: A Text and Reader. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford
Books, 1997.
Schriver, Karen A. Dynamics in Document Design. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Stilman, Anne. Grammatically Correct: The Writers Essential Guide to Punctuation,
Spelling, Style, Usage, and Grammar. Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 1997.
Strunk, Jr., William, E. B. White, and Roger Angell. The Elements of Style. New York:
Longman, 2000.
West, Richard, and Lynn H. Turner. Introduction to Communication Theory: Analysis and
Application. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004.
cultural studies
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Popular Culture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001.
Dates, Jannette L., and William Barlow, eds. Split Image: African Americans in the Mass
Media. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993.
Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. New
York: Basic Books, 2000.
Harris, Michael D. Colored Pictures: Race & Visual Representation. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Heller, Steven. The Graphic Design Reader. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Lipton, Ronnie. Designing across Cultures: How to Create EKective Graphics for Diverse
Ethnic Groups. Cincinnati: HOW Design Books, 2002.
Mafundikwa, Saki. Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika. New York: Mark Batty
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Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New
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design history and criticism
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Lavin, Maud. Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001.
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John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
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visual studies
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Elkins, James. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
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Kostelnick, Charles and Michael Hassett. Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual
Conventions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.
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about the contributors
Audrey Bennett is College Art Association professional development fellow and

associate professor of graphics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she teaches
and conducts research on the design of visual treatments and strategies that facilitate
user input in the design process. From 2002 to 2004, she served as communications
director for the board of directors of the Upstate New York Chapter of the American
Institute of Graphic Arts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Design
Research, Visible Language, The Education of a Typographer, The Education of a Graphic
Designer, Design Issues, and Voice: The Journal of Graphic Design, among others.
Andrew Blauvelt is an award-winning designer who has written numerous articles for
the likes of Emigr, Eye, Design Issues, and the AIGAs Journal of Graphic Design. He has
been design director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis since 1998.
Richard Buchanan is professor of design and former head of the School of Design at
Carnegie Mellon University. He is editor of Design Issues, a journal of design history,
theory, and criticism. He is also president of the Design Research Society.
Matt Cooke is the former head of education and communication for the World Cancer
Research Fund (WCRF) in London. Currently he is the founder of the award-winning
design studio Matt Cooke Design, and is also a partner and associate creative director
at Iron Creative in San Francisco.
453
Meredith Davis holds masters degrees in education and design from Penn State
University and Cranbrook Academy of Art, respectively. She is a professor of graphic
design at North Carolina State University, where she teaches graduate courses in design
and cognition.
Ewan Duncan is an engagement manager in the Chicago ogce of McKinsey &

Company. Previously he has worked with divine interVentures and Doblin Group, where
he specialized in creating market-based innovation programs, working with a range of
consumer and technology companies in new product and service development.
Ron Eglash is an associate professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of African Fractals: Modern Computing and
Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press). His current project, funded by the NSF,
HUD, and the New York Department of Education, translates the mathematical
concepts embedded in cultural designs of African, African-American, Native American,
and Latino communities into software design tools for secondary education.
Shelley Evenson is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon Universitys School of

Design. Her current interests include design strategy, design languages, design
prototyping, design for service, and what lies beyond user-centered design.
Jodi Forlizzi is an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of

Design, and at the Human Computer Interaction Institute. She conducts research on
how technology can bring people new kinds of experiences, beyond those traditionally
associated with human-computer interaction.
Jorge Frascara is a designer and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta,

Canada. His work has taken the various forms of illustration, lm animation, advertising,
and graphic design. He has published numerous books and articles in both English and
Spanish, including Design and the Social Sciences (Taylor & Francis) and Communication
Design (Allworth Press).
Roshi Givechi has been an interaction designer at IDEO since 1998. She has led and/or
worked on projects for clients such as AT&T Wireless, Gap, Medtronic, Merloni, NASA,
and Philips, among many others. She actively teaches IDEO methodology to clients
through IDEO U Innovation Workshops, and speaks at design conferences.
Ian Groulx, a senior graphic designer at IDEO, has over seven years of graphic design,
art direction, and branding experience. During his career, Ian has worked for several
branding agencies and design rms in San Francisco, including Landor, Addwater, and
Fine Design, with clients such as NEC, Fender, Oracle, Steelcase, and Sun Microsystems.
454 DESIGN STUDIES

Jonathan Grudin is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. He was previously
Professor of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine, and
taught at Aarhus, Keio, and Oslo Universities. He is now associate editor for human-
computer interaction of ACM Computing Surveys, and has co-written and edited the
widely used Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the New Millennium,
among other projects.
Steven Heller is the art director of the New York Times Book Review and co-chair of the
MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is the author, editor,
or co-author of over ninety books on design, popular culture, and political art, and
frequently writes on these themes for Print, I.D., Baseline, Metropolis, and Eye. Among
his most recent books are Design Literacy (Allworth), Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between
the Wars (Chronicle), The Education of a Comics Artist, and The Education of a Graphic
Designer (Allworth).
John Jennings is an Illinois-based designer, illustrator, writer, and art educator. His
work spans a diverse array of media in the visual arts including illustration, graphic
design, fashion design, web-based media, and ne art. Jenningss clients include:
Jackson State University, Universoul Circus, Close-Up Magazine, Pepsi inc., RAGE inc.,
Burger King, Brock Innovative Group, Primeridan, Robinson Communications, and Black
Thought Publishing. He is currently an assistant professor of graphic design at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Mukkai Krishnamoorthy received a Ph. D. in computer science from the Indian

Institute of Technology in 1976. He has taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York, since 1979, where he is currently an associate professor of computer
science. His research interests are in the design and analysis of combinatorial
algorithms, design, and implementation of novel computing environments.
Cherie Lebbon is a research fellow in the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal
College of Art in London. In addition she works as a research consultant with the Design
Council and several design companies. She has been a visiting professor at the Glasgow
School of Art, University of Westminster, and StaKordshire University. She is also a co-
editor of Inclusive Design (Springer Verlag).
Ellen Lupton is a former curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National

Design Museum, where she has organized and authored numerous exhibitions and
books. She is co-chair of the graphic design department at the Maryland Institute,
College of Art in Baltimore with J. Abbott Miller. Most recently she is the author of
D.I.Y.: Design it Yourself and Thinking with Type.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 455

Peter Martin has been teaching graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University
School of the Arts in Qatar since September 1999. His experience of working in design
education within a multicultural context has inspired his particular interest in design
problem denition, design education, and cross-cultural information design.
Katherine McCoy co-chaired Cranbrook Academy of Arts Design Department for

twenty-four years, and was a distinguished visiting professor at Londons Royal College
of Art and a senior lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technologys Institute of Design. She
served as national vice president of the AIGA and is a past president of both the
Industrial Designers Society of America and the American Center for Design. She has
also co-produced a television documentary on Japanese design, and continues to write
frequently on design criticism and history.
Ann McDonald has taught in graphic design and multimedia studies programs at
Northeastern University in Boston since 1998. Her interest in interactivity in physical
environment has been fueled through a collaboration with a Boston-area exhibit design
rm. McDonald continues to explore the screen-based potential of educational
interactive design for clients in collaboration with music and programming colleagues
at Northeastern University.
J. Abbott Miller is a designer, editor, art director, and writer. He is a partner in the
New York ogce of Pentagram, where his clients include the Guggenheim Museum, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, and Harley-Davidson International. He is editor and
art director of Twice magazine, and has designed numerous books and exhibitions. He is
co-chair of the graphic design department at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in
Baltimore with Ellen Lupton.
Patricia Neafsey is a pharmacologist and professor in the School of Nursing at the

University of Connecticut, where she is the director of the Center for Nursing Research.
With funding from the Donaghue Medical Foundation, she and collaborators with
expertise in visual communication design, gerontology nursing, and psychometrics
designed and tested an interactive learning software program to enable older adults to
avoid drug interactions. The International Medical Informatics Society gave the
research team a Best of Medical Informatics citation in 2003.
Paul J. Nini is associate professor, graduate studies chairperson, and coordinator of

the visual communication design undergraduate program in the Department of Design
at The Ohio State University. His writings have appeared in publications including Eye,
Information Design Journal, Looking Closer 4 (Allworth Press), and several design and
education conference proceedings. He is a former board member of the Graphic Design
Education Association, and former editor and designer of the IDSA annual education
conference proceedings.
456 DESIGN STUDIES

John Pruitt is a user research manager for the Tablet & Mobile PC Division at
Microsoft Corporation. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research
for a number of products, including Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Professional,
Windows XP, and MSN Explorer, versions 6, 7, and 8. He is the co-author of The Persona
Lifecycle (Morgan KauKman).
Marie Rarieya is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science and Technology

Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to her contributions as a
research assistant in Ron Eglashs Culturally Situated Design Tools project, she is writing
a dissertation on cultural and socio-economic dimensions of agricultural technological
innovations in the context of development in her homeland of Kenya.
Mark Roxburgh is the director of the visual communication program at the University
of Technology, Sydney. He has published numerous articles concerning issues of visual
practice and representation. In addition, he has worked as an image-maker and
photographer for some of Australias leading publications and design rms including
Rolling Stone, Juice, Social Change Media, HQ, and The Good Weekend.
Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders is senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial, Interior

and Visual Communication Design at the Ohio State University, co-founder of SonicRim,
and founder of MakeTools, LLC. She is a pioneer in the use of participatory research
methods for the design of products, systems, services, and spaces, and has worked with
such clients as AT&T, Apple, Coca-Cola, Compaq, Hasbro, IBM, Intel, Iomega, Kodak,
Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Thermos, and Xerox, among
many others.
Matthew Soar is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at

Concordia University, where he teaches classes in media studies and digital media
production. His research on the cultural economies of graphic design and advertising
has been published in the AIGAs Journal of Graphic Design, Eye, Journal of Consumer
Culture, Looking Closer 4, and Citizen Designer, among others.
Peter Storkerson has a Ph.D. in design from Illinois Institute of Technology, where he
developed empirical methods for studying communication processes. He is also co-
chair of the Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation of the International Institute of
Information Design. He has published articles on communication, visual organization,
memory, and theory in Visible Language and the International Journal of Design Sciences &
Technology. He teaches communication design at Southern Illinois University.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 457

Zoe Strickler is a visual communication designer with a research interest in
communication design for health behavior change. She has collaborated on several
studies related to injury prevention, including a communication intervention to reduce
casualty collisions among male problem drivers aged eighteen to twenty-four and an
interactive adherence intervention for HIV-positive individuals on antiretroviral
medications. She has held academic appointments at the Minneapolis College of Art
and Design and the University of Connecticut. She is currently at the Center for
Health/HIV Intervention and Prevention (CHIP), University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Judy DAmmasso Tarbox is a Ph.D. candidate in communication and rhetoric at

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation addresses the changing face of
literacy among the diverse student population we are faced with in todays academic
climate. She also serves as the acting director of the Writing Center at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maryland
University College, where she teaches distance education courses.
Liz C. Throop joined the School of Art and Design at Georgia State University in 1998.
She has written numerous articles for design journals and conferences, and has
practiced print, signage, and package design for such clients as Coca-Cola, Heery
International, Herman Miller, Macys, and the Aperture Foundation.
Ann C. Tyler is a professor of visual communication at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. She has exhibited at the American Center for Design, the Whitney Museum
of Art, the School of Museum Fine Arts in Boston, and the Chicago Historical Society,
among others. Her articles have been published in Communication Arts, Print, Design
Issues, Ideas in Design, and the AIGAs Journal of Graphic Design.
Marc Woollard, an art director at IDEO, has nine years of branding experience. Prior
to joining IDEO, Marc held senior design and art direction positions in several large ad
agencies creating brand campaigns for clients including the Guggenheim and
Hermitage Museums, Buick, GMC Truck, Lincoln, TiKany & Co., LOral, See Beyond, and
Audible.com.
Yavuz is chair of the graphic design department in the faculty of

Seval Dlgeroglu
ne arts at Mustafa Kemal University (MKU), Hatay, Turkey. She is currently the faculty
coordinator in MKU for the European Unions Education Mobility program (Erasmus).
She is also a review editor for the internet-based Design Research Journal of the
Australian Graphic Design Association. She teaches in the areas of graphic design,
computer-aided design, visual communication, visual perception, drawing, and
contemporary art criticism. Her current research projects are on constructivist design
and graphic design education.
458 DESIGN STUDIES

index
Abreu, Pedro Juan 296 Arts and Crafts movement 11 Blomquist, sa 314
activity theory 7380 Arvola, Mattias 314 Bdker, Susanne 32829
as model for design Asmal, Dr. Kadir 30005 Bonsiepe, Gui 132
research 17 audience Boserup, Esther 182
as a design approach 7478 as active participant 30, 35, Bosniak, Michael 39
as a heuristic device 7880 3738, 48, 196 (see also Bourdieu, Pierre 209, 214, 286
advertising 20, 3031, 33, 51, participatory design) Brand Integration Group (BIG)
202, 20626, 27388 as co-designer 17996 (see Ogilvy and Mather)
assessing quality of 21821 as decoder 37, 18283 Bruinsma, Max 35456
critical study of 20626, as interpreter of Buchanan, Richard 17, 20, 300
27388 communication 45, Burton Snowboards 204
cultural impact of 207, 15859, 163, 177 Butler, Frances 86
20912 consideration of 1719, 35,
research in 21618 3649, 5154, 5657, 59, Callinicos, Alex 214
social responsibility of 225 6869, 76, 7980, 130, Cape Town, South Africa 20
sociocultural elements in 13439, 143, 20005, 232, Caremark 4142
27388 312, 321, 355 Carroll, John M. 328
use of cultural symbols in creating empathy with the Casaus, Victor 292
27888 51, 5455, 61 Center for Learning in
use of stereotypes in 27888 educating the 36, 4244, Retirement (CLIR) 91, 92
advertising creatives 20708, 4748 Center for Multimedia Arts
21126, 27779 persuading the 36, 3842, (CMA), University of
and clients 21920 4748 Memphis 6667, 71
as cultural intermediaries target audience denition ChermayeK, Ivan 40
21226 134 Chomsky, Noam 207
as their own audience 208, vs. user 118 Clandinin, Jean 232
215, 21726 authorship 1112, 16, 68 Close, Chuck 15
aesthetics (see also graphic in advertising 20712 CoDesign 180
design, aesthetics in) avant-garde 2728 cognition 158, 16061, 164,
culturally appropriate 20, 17273, 177
17984, 186, 190, 293 Barnes, JeK 44 sensory 16061, 162
agnity diagrams 234, 238 Barthes, Roland 37, 21011, symbolic 16061, 162
African Americans 241 22425 collaboration (see also design,
stereotyping of 4446, 242, Battram, Arthur 261 collaborative)
252 Baudrillard, Jean 276 cross-cultural 182, 184,
agriculture 18182 Bauhaus 11, 18, 85, 201, 203, 267 29297
AIDS (see HIV/AIDS) Bayer, Herbert 85, 202 interdisciplinary 35467
Albers, Josef 27 Bell, Daniel 21213 Collins, Brian 5960, 62
Ali, Muhammad 6768 Benetton 4748, 225 color theory 99
Althuser, Louis 211 Bennett, Audrey 14, 19, 20, 179, communication (see also visual
American Center for Design 16 18385, 291 communication)
American Institute of Graphic Benson, Richard 212 cognitive process theory of
Designers (AIGA) 1516, Benyon, David 329 16063, 17273, 177
35455, 357 Berlo, David 18283 cross-cultural 19, 18182, 186
Design Archive 16 Bernbach, Bill 65 cross-mode 15963
design education listserve Berte, Jim 41 design (see communication
35758 Beyer, Hugh 234, 239 design)
Experience Design Bierut, Michael 16 egciency 2930
Community 355 BlackBoard 23538 David Berlos model of
anthropology 149, 269 Blackburn, Bruce 40 18283
visual 19 Bletter, Rosemarie 87 research (see communication
research)
459
communication (continued) and human rights 20, 30005 distinction between
stages of 163 as problem-solving activity undergraduate and
strategy 140, 143 118 graduate programs 3335
theory 30 as subculture 24344, 25455 research in university
Communication Arts 16 audience-centered 238 (see programs 7071
communication design 2932, also user-centered design) Design Methods movement 150
5155, 62, 15860, 163, collaborative 18, 181, 183 (see Deszo, Andrea 293, 296
177, 179, 185, 20005 also user-centered design) Dewey, John 232
corporate 20002 communication (see Diamond, Jared 34243
communication research 15877 communication design) Digital Vision 56
analogy 16162, 165, 168, 172 computer-aided 20002 directed storytelling 20, 23139
empirical studies 16377 consideration of audience in Dittmar, Helga 286
interpretation 15860, (see audience) divergent search 134, 13639
16265, 16769, 17173, contextual 18, 73 (see also Doordan, Dennis 303
17677 user-centered design) Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB)
complexity theory 261 corporate 120, 123 (see also 6465
Congaree Swamp 4243 subcultures, corporate Dlgeroglu
Yavuz, Seval 20, 273
Connelly, Michael 232 co-opting of) Dwiggins, W. A. 10, 15
consumption life of a product education (see design
27677, 287 education) ecology of the articial 152
contextual inquiry 20, 232, 234, evaluation of eKectiveness education (see design education)
239, 312 14042, 145 Eglash, Ron 179
Cooke, Matt 130 experience 70, 355 Ehses, Hanno 37, 343
Cooper, Alan 31112, 31415, for older adults (see Eisenman, Peter 87
320, 322, 32526 interaction design) elderly (see older adults)
Cooper, Bernard 338 grammatical model of 3738, Emigre 1011, 203, 225
Cooper Design 312 343 Engestrom, Yrgo 75
Corcoran, John 5659 graphic (see graphic design) Enlightenment Era 17
critique 246 human-centered 2021, Esquire 65, 6768
Cuba 20, 29297 30005, 30610 ethnography 14950, 153, 154,
cultural identity 20, 25859, information 89, 12122, 126 23133, 268, 312, 32930
26162, 26465, 267, interaction (see interaction (see also research,
26972 (see also design) ethnographic)
aesthetics, culturally interactive 17, 311, 354367 phenomenological 149
appropriate) interface 73, 89, 12021, 234 European Network for
cultural beliefs 47 paradigm 75 Intelligent Information
cultural studies 20809, participatory 1819, 17996 Interfaces 55
22123, 254 problem denition 256, 259, Evenson, Shelley 20, 231
circuit of culture 20809 26566, 268272 experience design 70, 355
short circuit of culture process 7879, 11821, expressive vs. pragmatic
22124 13045, 18386 approaches to design
culture 25962 socially responsible 145, 6471
25355, 35859 external vs. internal goods
DAmmasso Tarbox, Judy 17, 73 user-centered (see user- 34142, 344
Davis, Meredith 355, 35758 centered design)
de Jong, Meno 78, 80 waynding 12021, 12425 Farah, Martha 161
deconstruction 11 design domain vs. content Featherstone, Mike 21314
denotation 37 domain 153 Fella, Edward 253
design design education 1013, 15, 29, Fernndez, Oscar 293
analytic vs. synthetic 3135, 26970, 33337, First Things First manifesto
framework for 148, 35455, 35761 of 1964 16, 225
15052, 15455 co-teaching 36061 of 2000 1617, 225
and cultural identity (see Fischer, Michael 14950
cultural identity)
460 DESIGN STUDIES

focus groups 60, 6568, 91112, denition of 17, 28 human-centered design 2021,
180, 308 education (see design 30005, 30610
moderator neutrality 9293, education) human rights and design 20,
95 empirical approach to 18, 30005
prompting 9596, 97, 99, 20, 179, 18386
101, 102, 104 environmental 12021, 124 IBM 87
interpretation of data 96, goal of 30, 32, 38, 4648, IDEO 20, 30608
11112 75, 79 i~design 55
unfocus groups 308 professional practice 31, 33 Industrial Revolution 201, 243
Forlizzi, Jodi 17, 51 research-driven 6471 (see information theory 30
Fox, Mark 44 also research) interaction design 12021, 124
fractal 87 socially responsible 16, 17, for older adults 89112 (see
Frascara, Jorge 17, 26, 13132, 21, 28, 35, 5254, 62, also older adults)
135, 138, 140 33351 (see also design, intuition
Friends of the Tilonia 344 socially responsible) and design 1417, 32, 51, 54,
Frutiger 202 theory in (see theory) 68, 73, 7778, 117, 131, 147,
tools 7475 150, 152, 23132, 30809
gender 93, 10405 visual style 26, 3435 vs. research 1417, 19, 21, 73,
General Electric 28182 Grey, Greg 45 117, 231, 30809 (see also
Geertz, CliKord 232 Groulx, Ian 20, 306 expressive vs. pragmatic
Geismar, Thomas 40, 44 Grudin, Jonathan 21, 311 design)
Gestalt 29, 74, 75 Ireland, Christopher 232
Geyman, Bruce 43 Hall, Charles 61 Irwin, Terry 360
Giddens, Anthony 276 Hall, Stuart 209, 21112
gift-giving 238 Harris, Sylvia 182 Jager DiPaola Kemp Design 204
Givechi, Roshi 20, 306 Harvey, David 214 Jennings, John 20, 241
Glaser, Milton 88 Hayes, Harold 68 Jhally, Sut 20607, 210
globalization 17, 20, 73, 258, Helen Hamlyn Research Center Johnson, Mark 162
26365, 27172, 297 55, 57 Johnson, Richard 20809, 22123
Godard, Jean-Luc 214 Helfand, Jessica 354 Johnston, Edward 28
Gmez Frequet, Jos 295, 296 Heller, Steven 10, 355 Jones, John Chris 134, 137
Goodwin, Kim 312 Hendrik, Brooke 15354
graphic design (see also heuristics 78, 80, 181 (see also Kalman, Tibor 253
design; and visual activity theory) Kandinsky, Wassily 1819,
communication) Hip Hop 8485, 87
aesthetics in 1213, 2829, and design 20, 24255 Keler, Peter 85
31, 4647 as subculture 24344, 249, Kenya 19, 17996
and human rights 20 252, 25455 King, David 338
and intuition (see intuition) four elements of 244, King, Dr. Martin Luther 342,
and research (see research) 24850 34748
as art form 28 visual culture of 24155 Kline, Stephen 210
as communication tool remixing 25152 Kress, Gunther 152
2632, 35 Hirschman, Elizabeth 221 Krishnamoorthy, Mukkai 179
as microcosm of society 18 HIV/AIDS 19, 47, 5354 Krueger, Barbara 253
as rational and artistic in Africa 17996
activity 32 HoKmann, Armin 29 LakoK, George 162
assessment of quality 2832 Holocaust 303 Lanigan, Richard 160
collaborative approaches to Holtzblatt, Karen 234, 239 Laurel, Brenda 358, 361
(see design, collaborative) Hori, Allen 46 Lean Cuisine 65
competitions 1516, 200 HotSpot 257 Leach, William 34748
consideration of audience in Howard, Andrew 225 Lears, Jackson 214
(see audience) human behavior 2021, 32, Lebbon, Cherie 17, 51, 5759
cultural awareness in 17, 19, 7475, 311 legibility 29, 70, 93, 112, 158
20, 21 Leiss, William 210
INDEX 461
Levrant de Bretteville, Sheila 16 OBryan, Toni 20, 291 protocol analysis 172
Lewisham Council 5659 obesity, link to cancer risk prototypes 9293, 95, 101, 108
Likert scale 70 13132, 134, 137, 139, Pruitt, John 21, 311
Lincoln, Abraham 117 14142 psychology 31, 33, 7475, 8487
Lipton, Ronnie 181 Ogce of National Drug Control activity theory 7380
Lissitzky, El 2728, 348 Policy (ONDCP) 5962 behaviorism 75
logos 4344 Ogilvy and Mather 52, 5556, 59 cognitive theory 74 (see also
Lois, George 6470 Brand Integration Group cognition)
Lubensky, Dean 88 (BIG) 52, 5556, 5962 Gestalt 29, 74, 75
Lupton, Ellen 19, 84 Ohio State University, The 122, subjectivism 75
125, 127
MacDonald, Ross 16 older adults Qatar 20, 25659, 264, 26668,
Macauley, Catriona 329 aesthetic preferences of 27072
MacIntyre, Alisdair 34142 9293, 9699, 10103,
Mandela, Nelson 303 11012 race 93, 10405
Mandlebrot, Benoit 87 age-related loss of visual Rand, Paul 15, 2930
Marchand, Roland 221 and physical functions Rarieya, Maria 179, 180, 186,
Marcus, George 14950 92, 97, 99 10911 19293
Margolin, Victor 348 and drug interactions 8990, Rensselear Polytechnic
Martin, Peter 20, 256 9697 Institute 180
Marxism 201 design for 89112 representation-as-reference
McCoy, Katherine 20, 46, 200 Olivetti 29 (to the real) 15253
McDonald, Ann 21, 354 research 1213, 14, 21, 64, 6871,
McGuigan, Jim 21314 PanAm 3940 73, 117, 147, 307 (see also
McKeon, Richard 301 Papanek, Victor 143 research data and
Meggs, Philip 18283 participatory design 1819, research methods)
memory 173, 17677 17996 cognitive-based 77 (see also
perceptual 17677 Partnership for a Drug Free activity theory)
Methods Lab 55 America 59 collaborative 18 (see also
Molt, Eduardo 294 Patriot Act 21, 356, 359, 362 design, collaborative)
Motorola 59 Peckham, South London 56 communication (see
Microsoft 20 Pei, I. M. 257 communication research)
Windows 313, 31517, 319, Pelikan ink 27 empirical 14, 70, 73, 111, 160,
32123 Personas 21, 31130 16377, 179, 183, 18586
MSN Explorer 31316, 321 and contextual design ethnographic 66, 23133 (see
Miller, J. Abbott 19, 84 32930 also ethnography)
Mir, Joan 27 and ethnography 32930 human-centered 30610
modernism 15, 16, 19, 201, 203, and scenario-based design in advertising 21618
213, 33233 32829 interdisciplinary 1415, 21, 52
Moore, GeoKery 314 and task analysis 32829 limitations of 6465
MTV 65 and theory of mind 32627 photo-based 14854
Mller-Brockmann, Josef 2930 benets and risks of 32326 qualitative 66, 70, 89, 9192,
Muoz, Fabin 295 photography 14852, 15455 118
mythology 6061 photo-observation 14854 user-centered 19, 20, 52, 55,
Pintori, Giovanni 29 311, 314, 316, 322, 325 (see
Naremore, James 209 Poggenpohl, Sharon 64, 68, 71 also research methods,
narrative inquiry 20, 23233 Population Service International user-centered)
Neafsey, Patricia 19, 89 (PSI) 18889 vs. aesthetics in graphic
Neumeier, Marty 14 postmodernism 1617, 14950, design 1213
New York Aquarium 3839 267 vs. intuition 1417, 19, 21, 73,
New York Type Directors Club 16 Presence research program 55 117, 231, 30809 (see also
Nini, Paul 19, 64, 117 Print 16 expressive vs. pragmatic
Northeastern University 355, production life of a product design)
357, 366 (see consumption life) vs. practice 1516
462 DESIGN STUDIES

research data Searle, John 148 user-centered design 17, 18, 180,
accessibility to 5455, 71 semiotics 11, 30, 3738, 147, 185, 303 (see also
interpretation of 234 20911, 213, 224, 251 research, user-centered)
qualitative and quantitative and content analysis 210 liability issues for 127
13435 Shapiro, Karen 21517
research methods 18, 19, 52, 55, Shaviro, Steven 247 van der Geest, Thea 78, 80
131 signifying 24748 VanderLans, Rudy 11
audience-centered (see also Skolos, Nancy 15 van Doesburg, Theo 27
research methods, user- Slater, Don 210 Van Leeuwen, Theo 152
centered) Soar, Matthew 20, 206 van Toorn, Jan 132
audience testing 119, 185, 190 social beliefs 47 Victoire, James 16
behavioral 119, 121, 124 social science 20, 23132 Vignelli, Massimo 14
contextual observation sociology of news 207, 21112 Villaverde, Hctor 292, 296
30607 Sontag, Susan 338 visual communication 28, 31, 33,
directed storytelling 23139 South Africa 30005 3649, 51, 55, 132, 120,
ethnographic 66 (see also Southwark, England 57 127, 14748, 15053, 155
research, ethnographic; Council 56, 58 goal of 46, 48
and ethnography) Metropolitan Police 56, 58 grammatical model of
eld study 18384 Souttar, James 14 3738, 343
focus groups (see focus Speck, Richard 344 visual language 27, 53, 5657,
groups) Sprite 252 59, 74, 186, 190
human-centered 30610 Stone, Brian 357 visual literacy 73, 18283, 24546
market research 33, 64 Storkerson, Peter 19, 158 Visual Perceptions exhibition 44
participatory 11920, 126 Strickler, Zoe 19, 5455, 89 Vygotsky, Lev 7475
survey 119, 12223 structuration 276, 288
user-centered 52, 5456, 71, subcultures Waiting Room Information
11728, 13031, 13436, corporate co-opting of Services (WIS) 131, 137,
13840, 143, 185 (see also 24144, 25255 141, 145
research, user-centered) designing for 20005 Waltz, David 161
viewer-centered (see research Susman, Warren 347 Whats Your Anti-Drug?
methods, user-centered) Swiss School 202 campaign 6162
rhetoric 160 Whitehouse, Roger 142
rhetorical view of design 38, Taylor, Damilolo 56, 57 Whitney, Patrick 201
48, 5253, 62, 33435 Terminator 2 218 Williams, Raymond 208
Robben Island, South Africa theory 1415, 7374 Williamson, Judith 20608, 210
300, 303 Thompson, Bradbury 15 Winkler, Dietmar 64, 132
Roberts, Lucien 132 Throop, Liz C. 17, 64 Wire Design 52, 5559, 62
Rodchenko, Alexander 348 Toscani, Oliviero 225 Woolard, Marc 20, 306
Rogal, Mara 292 Toyota Prius 28285 World Cancer Research Fund
Rogers Brown, Kristin 292 Trace 356, 358, 360, 36367 (WCRF) 13032, 134, 137,
Roxburgh, Mark 19, 147 Tschichold, Jan 28 13942, 145
Roy, Arundhati 342, 344 Tyler, Ann 17, 21, 36, 52, 333 Writing Across the Curriculum
Runyan, Robert Miles 41, 44 typography 112 358
Rushworth, John 14 avant-garde 27
as discourse 46 York, Howard 39
St. Jude Childrens Research deconstructive 11
Hospital, Memphis TN role of aesthetics in 47
6671
Saint Sebastian 67 U.S. government 53, 59
Schmidt, Michael 67 Universal Declaration of
Schon, Donald 151, 154 Human Rights 30102
Schudson, Michael 21517 University of Technology
Schwitter, Kurt 27 Sydney 153
INDEX 463
image credits
chapter 1 chapter 9 chapter 17

Image courtesy Shizuko All images courtesy the author All images courtesy the author
Mller-Yoshikawa
chapter 11 chapter 18
chapter 2 All images courtesy the author Figs. 1, 2 Photo by Philip Habib;
Fig. 1 Courtesy Collection Fig. 1 Peter Storkerson, after courtesy Canon USA, Inc.
The Museum of Modern Art, Martha Farah, Text and Fig. 3 Courtesy Deloitte
New York. Poster Fund. Pictures: A Neuropsychological Consulting
Figs. 2, 3, 7, 8 Courtesy Tom Perspective, in Heinz Mandl Figs. 4, 6 Courtesy Toyota
Geismar, ChermayeK and and Joel Levin, eds., Knowledge Motor Sales
Geismar Associates Acquisition from Text and Fig. 5 Courtesy General Electric
Figs. 4, 6 Courtesy Robert Pictures (New York: North Fig. 7 Courtesy eBay
Miles Runyan, Runyan Hinsche Holland, 1989). 60.
Associates Fig. 2 Peter Storkerson, after chapter 19
Fig. 5 Courtesy L. Chapman Sylvie Molitor, Steven-Peter Fig. 1 Courtesy Kristin Rogers
Fig. 9 Courtesy American Ballstaedt, and Heinz Mandl, Brown
Institute of Graphic Arts Problems in Knowledge Fig. 2 Courtesy Mara Rogal
Fig. 10 Courtesy JeK Barnes Acquisition from Text and Fig. 3 Courtesy Andrea Dezs
Fig. 11 Courtesy Greg Grey Pictures, in Mandl and Joel Fig. 4 Courtesy Oscar Fernndez
Fig. 12 Courtesy Allen Hori Levin, eds., Knowledge Fig. 5 Courtesy Eduardo Molt
Fig. 13 Photo: Oliviero Toscani Acquisition from Text and Fig. 6 Courtesy Fabian Muoz
for Benetton Pictures (New York: North Fig. 7 Courtesy Jos Gmez
Holland, 1989), 22. Frequet
chapter 3 Fig. 8 Courtesy Hector Villaverde
All images courtesy the authors chapter 12 Fig. 9 Courtesy Pedro Juan Abreu
Fig. 1 David Berlo, Process of
chapter 5 Communication, 1st ed. 1960, chapter 21
All images courtesy the author reprinted with permission Image courtesy the authors
of Wadsworth, a division of
chapter 6 Thomson Learning. chapter 22
All images courtesy the authors Figs. 216 Courtesy the authors All images courtesy the authors
chapter 7 chapter 14 c h a p t e r 23
All images courtesy the authors Fig. 1 Richard Johnson, What Figs. 1, 8, 9 Courtesy Dimitry
Is Cultural Studies Anyway?, Tetin
chapter 8 Social Text 16 (1986/87). 1987, Fig. 2 Courtesy Anna Bandeko
Figs. 17 Courtesy the author reprinted with permission Fig. 3 Courtesy Russell Eadie
Fig. 8 Courtesy Peter of Duke University Press. Fig. 4 Courtesy So Youn Kim
Gerstmann All rights reserved. Fig. 5 Courtesy Jonas Bostrom
Fig. 9 Courtesy Michelle Byle Fig. 2 Courtesy the author Figs. 6, 11 Courtesy Elle Luna
Fig. 10 Courtesy Christopher Kay Fig. 7 Courtesy Emily Boyd
Fig. 11 Courtesy Andrew Ault, chapter 15 Fig. 10 Courtesy Russell Eadie
Andre Crooks, Silvia Hidalgo, All images courtesy Purin and Elle Luna
and J. Brandon King Phanichphant
Fig. 12 Courtesy Kate Gresham
464 DESIGN STUDIES

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Andrea Bennett-Design Studies - Theory and Research in Graphic Design-Princeton Architectural Press (2006)

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design

For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.

2006 Princeton Architectural Press

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Editor: Scott Tennent

foreword Better Skills through Better Research 10

i n t ro d u c t i o n The Rise of Research in Graphic Design 14

SECTION I Visionary Perspectives

chapter 1 Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science? 26

chapter 2 Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience 36

chapter 3 From Formalism to Social Signicance 51

chapter 4 Being Serious, Being Popular: 64

chapter 5 Activity Theory: A Model for Design Research 73

chapter 6 Triangle, Square, Circle: A Psychological Test 84

chapter 7 Visual Design of Interactive Software 89

chapter 8 Sharpening Ones Axe: Making a Case 117

chapter 9 Design Methodologies: Toward a 130

chapter 10 The Utility of Design Vision and 147

chapter 11 Communication Research: Theory, 158

chapter 12 Audience as Co-designer: Participatory 179

chapter 13 Graphic Design in a Multicultural World 200

chapter 14 Encoding Advertisements: Ideology and 206

chapter 15 Directed Storytelling: Interpreting 231

chapter 16 Dezyne Klass: Exploring Image-making 241

chapter 17 A Step Ahead of Praxis: The Role of 256

chapter 18 Mediating Messages: Cultural Reproduction 273

chapter 19 Compartiendo Sueos/Sharing Dreams: 291

SECTION IV Human-Centered Design

chapter 20 Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts 300

chapter 22 Personas: Practice and Theory 311

c h a p t e r 23 Educating Design Citizens: Passing on 333

chapter 24 In Between: Challenging the Role of 354

SECTION V Further Reading

Introduction Meredith Davis 372

Cultural Studies Bibliography Andrew Blauvelt 373

Cognition and Emotion Bibliography Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders 401

Design Planning Bibliography Ewan Duncan 415

Education and Learning Theory Bibliography Meredith Davis 431

interdisciplinary bibliography for design researchers 445

about the contributors 453

Better Skills through

The Rise of Research

Graphic design is at a crossroads. Looking back, one sees designers

intuition in graphic design

visionary perspec tives

toward a theoretical backbone for graphic design

28 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

the problem of qualit y in graphic design

FRASCARA: GRAPHIC DESIGN 29

are two diKerent expressions of this concern (fig . 1 ). Research developed

30 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

FRASCARA: GRAPHIC DESIGN 31

the education of graphic designers

32 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

FRASCARA: GRAPHIC DESIGN 33

34 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

First published in Design Issues 5, no. 1 (Fall 1988).

FRASCARA: GRAPHIC DESIGN 35

As the goal of all communication is to induce in the audience some

persuading the audience to ac t

38 DESIGN STUDIES: VISIONARY PERSPECTIVES

TYLER: SHAPING BELIEF 39

here, combined with other formal devices, makes a very diKerent