From Formalism to Social Significance in Communication Design

Abstract

Introduction At the heart of design is the goal of communication, and instilling a belief in the audience about the past, present, or future.' Historically, graphic and advertising design, fields 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: brand and identities, Web sites, and posters and photomontages-have largely relied on the designer's intuition and training to create appropriate visual messages. However, communication designers have begun to encounter a more difficult task in negotiating the client's vision and the viewer's response to the designed message. This is partly due to the fact that viewers of advertising messages differ from those of past decades. Consumers today are exceedingly diverse in age, income, and ability, and have a wider variety of expectations, influences, and education. Additionally, they have much more exposure to the constant stream of visual stimuli that today's media offer, and more diverse experiences responding to a world of designed messages. For these reasons, relying solely on the designer's intuition no longer may be the most effective approach for creating communications that resonate with a particular audience. Instead, designers must create empathy with the audiences for which they are designing. While product designers traditionally have made greater use of data about the people who their products are designed for, communication designers more often have relied on inference and personal insight when designing communicative artifacts. The result is that these artifacts may fail to inspire the audience they were designed for, or more critically, fail to change behavior in the way that was intended. Recently, the inclusion of user-centered, interdisciplinary methodologies in communication design processes has helped to find appropriate ways to reach today's viewers. Usercentered 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 1 Richard Buchanan, Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument and Demonstration in Design Practice in Design Discourse. History Theory Criticism, Victor Margolin, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 92.