Me and our group at dinner after Design Week.
Design Project 7 - Family Crest
Elements
1. Myself
2. Last name: Harvey (also add Mothers maiden name, Wood.
3. Wagon - Represents family traveling crossing the planes.
4. Boat - Represents family coming from England.
5. Banners - Represents the banner with my family name on it and when we were established.
6. Color White: Purity
7. Woods Cross, Cottonwood, and Layton cities
Elements of my name:
1. Respectable
2. Hard Working
3. Honorable
4. LDS (Mormon)
5. Travelers
6. Creative
Reading Assignment 9
Reading Assignment
A NEW PARADIGM
- At the same time as post-modern ideas presented interesting challenges to the dominant modernist paradigm, the digital revolution of the late 1980s and the 1990s distracted designers with more practical concerns about how they did their work.
-The expansion of the internet, originally designed as communication technology for research scientists and the military, also opened the door to entirely new areas of design practice.
THE INSIGHT OF MARSHAL McLUHAN
- Was responsible for the some of the earliest discourse about media culture and its impact on society, and many of his ideas are still provocative today.
- His ideas within the context of the networked environment include: The medium is the message, hot and cool media, acoustical space, and the global village.
- McLuhan posed four questions that we should ask about any medium in order to understand its effects. He called these the "tetrad" or laws of media: Amplification: What aspects of society or human life does the medium enhance or amplify? Obsolescence: What aspect of earlier media does it eclipse or obsolesce? Retrieval: What does the medium retrieve or pull back into center stage from the shadows of obsolescence? Reversal: What does the medium reverse or flip into when it has run its course or been developed to its fullest potential?
A CONVERGENCE OF MEDIA
- The collision of convergence of old and new produce outcomes that often define particular periods in our technological world.
- Remediation is the process through which the characteristics and approaches of competing media are imitated, altered, and critiqued in a new medium - representation of one medium in another.
- Hypermediacy - bits and pieces of other media assembled as fragments within the context of the new medium, or completely subsumes older media so that they are no longer recognizable.
WHAT IS A SYSTEM?
- Graphic designers tend to define systems as something they make: a graphic identity system; a packaging system for a family of related products; or a typographic system for the layout of magazines. In these cases, the designer determines rules for how visual/spatial components relate to each other in a variety of applications.
-We need to to consider design as an element or force that produces some kind of change within other systems that are included in the definition of the problem.
-Systems may be affected by outside forces, but they always respond in ways that are characteristic to the system itself. If the same force were to affect a different system, the result would be different, even through the force is the same.
COMPLEXITY AND EXPERIENCE
- Implicit in design work or the technological mediation of experience at these levels is the ida of complexity, or an increasingly intricate web or interactions among people, objects, and settings.
THE NATURE OF EXPERIENCE
- In the 1930's, John Dewey wrote that an experience must have a beginning and an end; we know when it starts and when it finishes. He referred to this as "material running its course to fulfillment."
- It is also important to understand that we as designers cannot design someone else's experience. We can design the conditions in and through which someone constructs his or her own experience.
THE CHANGING NOTION OF AUDIENCE
- Under post modernist frameworks, the designer was also a critic, intervening on the audience's behalf to point out the character of the social landscape: its plurality of meanings, its relationships of power, and the shifting value of its signs.
-Under such communication missions, the designer's concept of audience was shaped largely by personal experience and longstanding cultural conventions governing the presentation of printed information.
SCENARIOS, CONCEPT MAPS, AND PERSONAS
-Scenarios are stories or scripts for projected action. They break down the activities of users into narrative episodes that describe what a user is trying to achieve and the conditions and sequence of steps under which he or she is likely to achieve it.
- Concept maps illustrate how actions or events may be sequenced in larger systems.
- Personas are descriptions of actual or invented people with particular social roles that allow the designer to think of user interactions in terms of specific goals and behaviors.
A NEW PARADIGM
- Hugh Dubberly, came up with questions we must ask ourselves when designing a system:
- For this situation, what is the system?
- What is the environment?
- What goal does the system have in relation to its environment?
- What is the feedback loop by which the system corrects its actions?
- How dose the system measure whether it has achieved its goal?
- Who defines the system, environment, goal, etc.; and monitors it?
- What resources does the system have for maintaing the relationship it desires?
- Are its resources sufficient to meet its purpose?
A NEW PARADIGM
- At the same time as post-modern ideas presented interesting challenges to the dominant modernist paradigm, the digital revolution of the late 1980s and the 1990s distracted designers with more practical concerns about how they did their work.
-The expansion of the internet, originally designed as communication technology for research scientists and the military, also opened the door to entirely new areas of design practice.
THE INSIGHT OF MARSHAL McLUHAN
- Was responsible for the some of the earliest discourse about media culture and its impact on society, and many of his ideas are still provocative today.
- His ideas within the context of the networked environment include: The medium is the message, hot and cool media, acoustical space, and the global village.
- McLuhan posed four questions that we should ask about any medium in order to understand its effects. He called these the "tetrad" or laws of media: Amplification: What aspects of society or human life does the medium enhance or amplify? Obsolescence: What aspect of earlier media does it eclipse or obsolesce? Retrieval: What does the medium retrieve or pull back into center stage from the shadows of obsolescence? Reversal: What does the medium reverse or flip into when it has run its course or been developed to its fullest potential?
A CONVERGENCE OF MEDIA
- The collision of convergence of old and new produce outcomes that often define particular periods in our technological world.
- Remediation is the process through which the characteristics and approaches of competing media are imitated, altered, and critiqued in a new medium - representation of one medium in another.
- Hypermediacy - bits and pieces of other media assembled as fragments within the context of the new medium, or completely subsumes older media so that they are no longer recognizable.
WHAT IS A SYSTEM?
- Graphic designers tend to define systems as something they make: a graphic identity system; a packaging system for a family of related products; or a typographic system for the layout of magazines. In these cases, the designer determines rules for how visual/spatial components relate to each other in a variety of applications.
-We need to to consider design as an element or force that produces some kind of change within other systems that are included in the definition of the problem.
-Systems may be affected by outside forces, but they always respond in ways that are characteristic to the system itself. If the same force were to affect a different system, the result would be different, even through the force is the same.
COMPLEXITY AND EXPERIENCE
- Implicit in design work or the technological mediation of experience at these levels is the ida of complexity, or an increasingly intricate web or interactions among people, objects, and settings.
THE NATURE OF EXPERIENCE
- In the 1930's, John Dewey wrote that an experience must have a beginning and an end; we know when it starts and when it finishes. He referred to this as "material running its course to fulfillment."
- It is also important to understand that we as designers cannot design someone else's experience. We can design the conditions in and through which someone constructs his or her own experience.
THE CHANGING NOTION OF AUDIENCE
- Under post modernist frameworks, the designer was also a critic, intervening on the audience's behalf to point out the character of the social landscape: its plurality of meanings, its relationships of power, and the shifting value of its signs.
-Under such communication missions, the designer's concept of audience was shaped largely by personal experience and longstanding cultural conventions governing the presentation of printed information.
SCENARIOS, CONCEPT MAPS, AND PERSONAS
-Scenarios are stories or scripts for projected action. They break down the activities of users into narrative episodes that describe what a user is trying to achieve and the conditions and sequence of steps under which he or she is likely to achieve it.
- Concept maps illustrate how actions or events may be sequenced in larger systems.
- Personas are descriptions of actual or invented people with particular social roles that allow the designer to think of user interactions in terms of specific goals and behaviors.
A NEW PARADIGM
- Hugh Dubberly, came up with questions we must ask ourselves when designing a system:
- For this situation, what is the system?
- What is the environment?
- What goal does the system have in relation to its environment?
- What is the feedback loop by which the system corrects its actions?
- How dose the system measure whether it has achieved its goal?
- Who defines the system, environment, goal, etc.; and monitors it?
- What resources does the system have for maintaing the relationship it desires?
- Are its resources sufficient to meet its purpose?
Reading Assignment 8
Reading Assignment 8: Chapter 6
THE CONCEPT OF POST-MODERNISM IS NOT A SIMPLE ONE
POST-MODERNISM
-Dick Hebdige describes Post-Modernism as "modernity without the hope and dreams which made modernity bearable." It's modernity without certainty, without clarity or meaning, and without a common social purpose.
-Charles Jenks views post-modernism as a combination of modernist techniques and styles with something more sympathetic to the viewer. In "What is post-modernism", Jencks traced the confusion between post-modernism and lat modernism to the fact that both arise from post-industrial society.
SIGNS OF DISCONTENT
-In 1966, American architect Robert Venturi delivered a speech that was later documented in a book entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. His "gentle manifesto" confronted head-on the contrasting values of modern and post-modern architecture, even though he claimed to have nothing to do with post-modernism. He describes this preference for the "difficult whole," a "messy vitality," rather than a certain unity; a hybridization of forms that celebrated "both/and" rather than "either/or" in their references and meanings.
-Jenks felt modern architects were deluding themselves by claims of universal form. He argued instead of Pluralism - a variety of styles that arise from the local culture - and that such a pastiche is rich with values and codes that are read differently by viewers.
-Several major themes emerged from early post-modern experiments in design and shaped work through the last decades of the twentieth century: -writerly rather than readerly text. -plural rather than singular meanings. - metonymy rather than metaphor. -cultural position. - vernacular, appropriated, and default forms. - hyperreality and the importance of image.
ONE VS. MANY
-At the core of post-structuralism is a concern for multiple meanings, for a lack of resolution about the meaning of something. Early structuralist theory sought meaning in the relationships among things, not in the things themselves. It asked questions about whether meaning resides in the object or in the its relationship to other objects and its context. Post-structuralism addresses the same questions but acknowledges that they will never be answered, because meaning is inherently unstable.
- Modernism assumes that there are Metanarratives that explain how the world works and that they are natural, true, and not the product of ideology. Such metanarratives, say the modernists, may be found in science, religion, and other social institutions. Post-modernism, on the other hand, questions these narratives and reveals their underlying value systems and biases.
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
-Metaphor: concerns analogy, or one things representing something else.
-Metonymy: Is when a single attribute or another object suggests the thing for which something stands in a less direct way.
-Metaphors aim to close down meaning - something is like something else in very specific ways, and is therefore not like other things. Where as Metonymy opens up meaning and defers our resolution of understanding about its intention.
CULTURAL POSITION
-The post-modern interest in plural meanings also hints at another overriding theme: recognition that we, as designers, frame a view of the world through the artifacts and representations we produce, and that this worldview will be formed and interpreted differently on the basis of cultural experience.
-Post-modernism views gender, race, class, and ethnicity as social constructions that are privileged (or not privileged), circulated, and maintained through the representations and practices of the dominant culture.
Dori Tunstall thoughts: Historical consciousness is people's understanding of where they come from, who they are, and where they are going. Life Goals embody what matters most to them member of the community. Community Structure addresses how the collective makes decisions and how individuals fit in and contribute. Relationships are the means through which people people gain understanding of common values and establish trust. Agency is the degree of the individual's control or influence over the things that matter to the community and themselves.
VERNACULAR, APPROPRIATED, AND DEFAULT FORMS
- Post-modern use or borrowed form differs from the meaning of these same forms in their original settings or as one-to-one illustrations of subject matter. The designer is therefore dislocated in a cultural sense-he or she comments from outside the represented culture, choosing these references as a second level signification or value achieved by their reuse in a new context. The repurposed cultural form may contradict or make ambiguous the meaning of its new context which forces us to consider the elitism of museums and their audiences.
HYPERREALITY AND LIVING IN THE IMAGE
-Italian philosopher Umberto Eco addresses cultural production and exchange of meanings in the relationships among producers, objects, and users. We can consider an object in any of five ways: as a physical thing that has an exchange value; as a sign of some social status; and a s a cultural unit that can enter into a discourse with other cultural units.
THE CONCEPT OF POST-MODERNISM IS NOT A SIMPLE ONE
POST-MODERNISM
-Dick Hebdige describes Post-Modernism as "modernity without the hope and dreams which made modernity bearable." It's modernity without certainty, without clarity or meaning, and without a common social purpose.
-Charles Jenks views post-modernism as a combination of modernist techniques and styles with something more sympathetic to the viewer. In "What is post-modernism", Jencks traced the confusion between post-modernism and lat modernism to the fact that both arise from post-industrial society.
SIGNS OF DISCONTENT
-In 1966, American architect Robert Venturi delivered a speech that was later documented in a book entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. His "gentle manifesto" confronted head-on the contrasting values of modern and post-modern architecture, even though he claimed to have nothing to do with post-modernism. He describes this preference for the "difficult whole," a "messy vitality," rather than a certain unity; a hybridization of forms that celebrated "both/and" rather than "either/or" in their references and meanings.
-Jenks felt modern architects were deluding themselves by claims of universal form. He argued instead of Pluralism - a variety of styles that arise from the local culture - and that such a pastiche is rich with values and codes that are read differently by viewers.
-Several major themes emerged from early post-modern experiments in design and shaped work through the last decades of the twentieth century: -writerly rather than readerly text. -plural rather than singular meanings. - metonymy rather than metaphor. -cultural position. - vernacular, appropriated, and default forms. - hyperreality and the importance of image.
ONE VS. MANY
-At the core of post-structuralism is a concern for multiple meanings, for a lack of resolution about the meaning of something. Early structuralist theory sought meaning in the relationships among things, not in the things themselves. It asked questions about whether meaning resides in the object or in the its relationship to other objects and its context. Post-structuralism addresses the same questions but acknowledges that they will never be answered, because meaning is inherently unstable.
- Modernism assumes that there are Metanarratives that explain how the world works and that they are natural, true, and not the product of ideology. Such metanarratives, say the modernists, may be found in science, religion, and other social institutions. Post-modernism, on the other hand, questions these narratives and reveals their underlying value systems and biases.
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
-Metaphor: concerns analogy, or one things representing something else.
-Metonymy: Is when a single attribute or another object suggests the thing for which something stands in a less direct way.
-Metaphors aim to close down meaning - something is like something else in very specific ways, and is therefore not like other things. Where as Metonymy opens up meaning and defers our resolution of understanding about its intention.
CULTURAL POSITION
-The post-modern interest in plural meanings also hints at another overriding theme: recognition that we, as designers, frame a view of the world through the artifacts and representations we produce, and that this worldview will be formed and interpreted differently on the basis of cultural experience.
-Post-modernism views gender, race, class, and ethnicity as social constructions that are privileged (or not privileged), circulated, and maintained through the representations and practices of the dominant culture.
Dori Tunstall thoughts: Historical consciousness is people's understanding of where they come from, who they are, and where they are going. Life Goals embody what matters most to them member of the community. Community Structure addresses how the collective makes decisions and how individuals fit in and contribute. Relationships are the means through which people people gain understanding of common values and establish trust. Agency is the degree of the individual's control or influence over the things that matter to the community and themselves.
VERNACULAR, APPROPRIATED, AND DEFAULT FORMS
- Post-modern use or borrowed form differs from the meaning of these same forms in their original settings or as one-to-one illustrations of subject matter. The designer is therefore dislocated in a cultural sense-he or she comments from outside the represented culture, choosing these references as a second level signification or value achieved by their reuse in a new context. The repurposed cultural form may contradict or make ambiguous the meaning of its new context which forces us to consider the elitism of museums and their audiences.
HYPERREALITY AND LIVING IN THE IMAGE
-Italian philosopher Umberto Eco addresses cultural production and exchange of meanings in the relationships among producers, objects, and users. We can consider an object in any of five ways: as a physical thing that has an exchange value; as a sign of some social status; and a s a cultural unit that can enter into a discourse with other cultural units.
Design Project 4 - Constructivist Album Cover
Design Project - Constructivist Album Cover
DESIGN BRIEF
Album Artist: Kanye West - "Yeezus"
Audience: Teenagers and young adults whom are interested in hip-hop and R&B music.
Objectives of the work: Incorporate a feel of constructivism into the album cover. Add artist, album title, song titles, and attractive colors to attract the buyer.
Constructivist Influences: Music, Industrialization, Fashion, Politics, Emotion, Architecture, Language, Religion.
Messaging Hierarchy: -Kanye West, -"Yeezus", - track titles
References:
Reading Assignment 7
Reading Assignment 7
THE TROUBLESOME ISSUES OF CLASS AND STYLE
-The corollary to style is the taste, an interpretation "informed by experiences related to one's social class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of Identity. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdie studied the notion of taste in the 1970's and argues that it was not inherent in particular people but learned through "institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.
-The public appetite for style was fueled by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century factories and standardization expanded public access to manufactured goods, and changed the value of image.
THE PUBLIC APPETITE FOR STYLE
-Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth-century Paris shopping arcades as "internal streets" for window shopping. Much like today's "mall rats", modern consumers wanted both to see and to be seen, creating an appetite for constantly changing visual appearance, status-conscious style, and the consumption of material goods.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
- Modernists who sought social progress, "style" was a dirty word - it was something dishonest, not to be trusted, the antithesis of function. Modern designers decried the ornament and form that were associated with historicism, with nostalgia for a specific past and places that no longer existed, and with an aristocracy that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political agenda.
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
- The initial goal of the movement was to provide fine design for for every home. This constituted a critique of mass-produced form and the loss of individuality and craftsmanship that was brought about by the Industrial Revolution and exemplified by the exhibitions of 1851 and 1900.
-The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the beauty of of humble materials and also introduced the notion that middle-class ladies and gentlemen could earn money as designers of furniture and textiles without jeopardizing their social standing.
-By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement style had been reduced to an established visual language for home interiors, what the historian Christopher Crouch calls a "superficial coding for rusticity and tradition to provide an escape from the industrial present."
THE TROUBLESOME ISSUES OF CLASS AND STYLE
-The corollary to style is the taste, an interpretation "informed by experiences related to one's social class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of Identity. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdie studied the notion of taste in the 1970's and argues that it was not inherent in particular people but learned through "institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.
-The public appetite for style was fueled by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century factories and standardization expanded public access to manufactured goods, and changed the value of image.
THE PUBLIC APPETITE FOR STYLE
-Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth-century Paris shopping arcades as "internal streets" for window shopping. Much like today's "mall rats", modern consumers wanted both to see and to be seen, creating an appetite for constantly changing visual appearance, status-conscious style, and the consumption of material goods.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
- Modernists who sought social progress, "style" was a dirty word - it was something dishonest, not to be trusted, the antithesis of function. Modern designers decried the ornament and form that were associated with historicism, with nostalgia for a specific past and places that no longer existed, and with an aristocracy that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political agenda.
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
- The initial goal of the movement was to provide fine design for for every home. This constituted a critique of mass-produced form and the loss of individuality and craftsmanship that was brought about by the Industrial Revolution and exemplified by the exhibitions of 1851 and 1900.
-The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the beauty of of humble materials and also introduced the notion that middle-class ladies and gentlemen could earn money as designers of furniture and textiles without jeopardizing their social standing.
-By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement style had been reduced to an established visual language for home interiors, what the historian Christopher Crouch calls a "superficial coding for rusticity and tradition to provide an escape from the industrial present."
Reading Assignment 6
Reading Assignment 6
A NEW CENTURY
-The assembly line fragmented the production process into discrete tasks for which individual workers held only a fraction of the knowledge and skills necessary to bring products to market. It standardized form so that the same object could be made repeatedly with identical effort and quality by a large number of workers.
-A century of dramatic population growth and advances in manufacturing technology had therefore transformed a culture of famers and craftsmen into a consumer society.
STRIVING FOR OBJECTIVITY AND LOGIC
- Overturning the centuries of belief in tradition and superstition under oppressive monarchies and the church, the progressive movements of the Enlightenment embraced Objectivity, rationality, and order.
-The twentieth-century workplace was also subject to new objective measures of success. Taylorism, developed and promoted by the mechanical engineer F.W. Taylor, determined the optimal method for performing a manufacturing task, trained workers in standardized jobs, and rewarded increased production output through incentives.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGE
- Photography, fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century, was a medium that as consistent with an objective view of the world and the public's appetite for images of a new age. The representation of places and events was no longer subject to the individual, edited interpretations of illustration; the stylistic mannerisms of drawing; or the longer exposures of the Daguerreotype, which made it impossible to capture the movement of busy urban life.
- The use of photographic images in advertising, journalism, fine art, and the depiction of everyday life drew as the century progressed, and the photograph gained particular status in illustration modern culture to the people who lived in it. Through its technological production, the photograph carried the imprimatur of "objective truth", of its maker having "been there" and recorded the state f affairs accurately.
GEOMETRY AND ABSTRACTION
- Many modern movements were experiments to define new roles for the pure sensory experience of abstract visual form. Rejecting the illusionistic visual conventions of the nineteenth century as irrelevant to the conditions of a new age and as too closely associated with elitist visions of high culture, these artists and designers created new, never-before-seen relationships between form and function.
- Designers therefore found in abstraction: an embodiment of the values of scientific reasoning and objectivity; the language of technology; the properties of non-representational, sensory experience; and a semblance of elemental order in a world of political and social chaos.
STANDARDIZATION
- Geometric form also lent itself to Standardization, which was increasingly necessary as factories and building construction flooded the market with components that had to work together.
-Abstraction eliminated such artifice, and the experience of space, weight, motion, and color was the result of direct perception, unimpeded by our intellectual understanding of representational systems that mediate our true experience of the world.
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIVERSAL
-Modern design ideologies therefore shared a belief in underlying principles of form that transcended specific cultures and contexts. If direct, sensory experience of this abstraction exists outside the influence of cultural conventions, it could be seen as Universal, as fundamental to human existence. If such forms are essentially human then it was through form that design could further the humanistic social agendas of the early twentieth century and escape the cultural superficiality of style and historicism.
THE UNIVERSAL PICTURE LANGUAGE OF NEURATH
-"Words Make Division, Pictures Make Connection." Otto Neurath saw reading pictures as a universal experience that could be applied to the translation of statistical data, scientific explanations, and the problems of transnational travel.
A NEW CENTURY
-The assembly line fragmented the production process into discrete tasks for which individual workers held only a fraction of the knowledge and skills necessary to bring products to market. It standardized form so that the same object could be made repeatedly with identical effort and quality by a large number of workers.
-A century of dramatic population growth and advances in manufacturing technology had therefore transformed a culture of famers and craftsmen into a consumer society.
STRIVING FOR OBJECTIVITY AND LOGIC
- Overturning the centuries of belief in tradition and superstition under oppressive monarchies and the church, the progressive movements of the Enlightenment embraced Objectivity, rationality, and order.
-The twentieth-century workplace was also subject to new objective measures of success. Taylorism, developed and promoted by the mechanical engineer F.W. Taylor, determined the optimal method for performing a manufacturing task, trained workers in standardized jobs, and rewarded increased production output through incentives.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGE
- Photography, fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century, was a medium that as consistent with an objective view of the world and the public's appetite for images of a new age. The representation of places and events was no longer subject to the individual, edited interpretations of illustration; the stylistic mannerisms of drawing; or the longer exposures of the Daguerreotype, which made it impossible to capture the movement of busy urban life.
- The use of photographic images in advertising, journalism, fine art, and the depiction of everyday life drew as the century progressed, and the photograph gained particular status in illustration modern culture to the people who lived in it. Through its technological production, the photograph carried the imprimatur of "objective truth", of its maker having "been there" and recorded the state f affairs accurately.
GEOMETRY AND ABSTRACTION
- Many modern movements were experiments to define new roles for the pure sensory experience of abstract visual form. Rejecting the illusionistic visual conventions of the nineteenth century as irrelevant to the conditions of a new age and as too closely associated with elitist visions of high culture, these artists and designers created new, never-before-seen relationships between form and function.
- Designers therefore found in abstraction: an embodiment of the values of scientific reasoning and objectivity; the language of technology; the properties of non-representational, sensory experience; and a semblance of elemental order in a world of political and social chaos.
STANDARDIZATION
- Geometric form also lent itself to Standardization, which was increasingly necessary as factories and building construction flooded the market with components that had to work together.
-Abstraction eliminated such artifice, and the experience of space, weight, motion, and color was the result of direct perception, unimpeded by our intellectual understanding of representational systems that mediate our true experience of the world.
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIVERSAL
-Modern design ideologies therefore shared a belief in underlying principles of form that transcended specific cultures and contexts. If direct, sensory experience of this abstraction exists outside the influence of cultural conventions, it could be seen as Universal, as fundamental to human existence. If such forms are essentially human then it was through form that design could further the humanistic social agendas of the early twentieth century and escape the cultural superficiality of style and historicism.
THE UNIVERSAL PICTURE LANGUAGE OF NEURATH
-"Words Make Division, Pictures Make Connection." Otto Neurath saw reading pictures as a universal experience that could be applied to the translation of statistical data, scientific explanations, and the problems of transnational travel.
Design Project 3 - Signifier & Signified
Signifier = The shoes
Signified = The text
The design I came out with out of the blue one day while trying to decide on a new project to come up with. The meaning of this piece is to show what a life may be like in some parts of the country. Shoes over a telephone wire resembles a few different things; a drug lord is in control of particular area and neighborhoods within that area; a certain gang controls that part of the area, and it could also mean that there could be prostitution going on within that area.
With that kind of lifestyle, that is one that you wouldn't want to associate with. What I have tried to portrait is that in these kind of areas, that lifestyle may actually be the "good life". A life of partying, sex, drugs, music, and no responsibility. A may be a dream life to people, but most often it isn't an ideal kind of lifestyle to live. For a lot of us, I think we are still trying to find "the good life."
Reading Assignment 5
Reading Assignment 5 - Chapter 4
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: THE BIRTH OF SEMIOTICS
Semiotics: The study of life of "signs."
-Ferdinad de Saussure: His study was the approach to the study of language focused on the exchange of meaning between individuals and on the commonalities across languages, rather than on the eccentricities arising from their specific cultural origins. He thought that language should be viewed not only in terms or its parts (words) and their histories, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts.
-Signified and the Signifier:
- The Signified: is the person, thing, event, place, or concept called forth by the stimulation of the signifier. The signifier is the sound or word (or image, in the case of graphic design) that recalls in our mind the signified, even in the absence of the real thing.
- The Signifier: The designation of the Signifier as a discrete component of language makes it possible to discuss writing as different from speech, visual signs as different from verbal signs and, consequently, form itself as a critical contributor to meaning.
LANGUE AND PAROLE
-Langue: is the set of abstract rules within the language system that governs the combinations of signs; a group of general linguistic conventions adopted by a particular social or cultural group that allows them to construct exchange meaning among their members.
-Parole: is the individual utterance made by a single member of the linguistic group in a specific, concrete situation - an individual act of discourse among many of infinite variety.
THE ASSAULT ON SYNTAX
-If the conventional correspondences between meaning and form were arbitrary to begin with, as the early writings in semiotics professed, then they were subject to recognition. And that renegotiation could take place through the visual media of art and design.
DESIGN PAROLE
-Paradigmatic or Associative Axis: (in this case Synchronic) All of the possible word choices are available to us simultaneously and we interpret the meaning of the sentence, not only by focusing on the on chosen word, but also by knowing what other choices were available and not chosen.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A PRAGMATIST'S APPROACH:
He believed that Signification, or the consumption of signs, is essentially a mental process, and that meaning resides in the mind, not in the objects themselves. Peirce called this process Semiosis.
(A sign (representamen) stands for something (object) to somebody (interpretant) in some respect (ground).
Peirce's four conditions of design: 1) Sign must represent and object. 2) Must represent something in some sense or capacity. 3) Interpretative condition, sign must have an interpretation. 4) Must have a fundamental relationship between them, one that cannot be reduced to any simpler form.
A TAXONOMY OF SIGNS
-Describes natural groupings of signs that behave in analogous ways, and their classification, in terms of different relationships between the signifier (the reprsentamen) and the object for which it stands.
-An index points to something or describes a casual relationship.
ROLAND BARHES: A BRIDGE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM
-Barthes professed that no form of writing is a free expression only of the writer's subjectivity, but is the product of larger social and ideological values. H viewed writings as all style and never free of ideology; each literary work signifies literature in general, in addition to whatever content is contained within its text.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: THE BIRTH OF SEMIOTICS
Semiotics: The study of life of "signs."
-Ferdinad de Saussure: His study was the approach to the study of language focused on the exchange of meaning between individuals and on the commonalities across languages, rather than on the eccentricities arising from their specific cultural origins. He thought that language should be viewed not only in terms or its parts (words) and their histories, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts.
-Signified and the Signifier:
- The Signified: is the person, thing, event, place, or concept called forth by the stimulation of the signifier. The signifier is the sound or word (or image, in the case of graphic design) that recalls in our mind the signified, even in the absence of the real thing.
- The Signifier: The designation of the Signifier as a discrete component of language makes it possible to discuss writing as different from speech, visual signs as different from verbal signs and, consequently, form itself as a critical contributor to meaning.
LANGUE AND PAROLE
-Langue: is the set of abstract rules within the language system that governs the combinations of signs; a group of general linguistic conventions adopted by a particular social or cultural group that allows them to construct exchange meaning among their members.
-Parole: is the individual utterance made by a single member of the linguistic group in a specific, concrete situation - an individual act of discourse among many of infinite variety.
THE ASSAULT ON SYNTAX
-If the conventional correspondences between meaning and form were arbitrary to begin with, as the early writings in semiotics professed, then they were subject to recognition. And that renegotiation could take place through the visual media of art and design.
DESIGN PAROLE
-Paradigmatic or Associative Axis: (in this case Synchronic) All of the possible word choices are available to us simultaneously and we interpret the meaning of the sentence, not only by focusing on the on chosen word, but also by knowing what other choices were available and not chosen.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A PRAGMATIST'S APPROACH:
He believed that Signification, or the consumption of signs, is essentially a mental process, and that meaning resides in the mind, not in the objects themselves. Peirce called this process Semiosis.
(A sign (representamen) stands for something (object) to somebody (interpretant) in some respect (ground).
Peirce's four conditions of design: 1) Sign must represent and object. 2) Must represent something in some sense or capacity. 3) Interpretative condition, sign must have an interpretation. 4) Must have a fundamental relationship between them, one that cannot be reduced to any simpler form.
A TAXONOMY OF SIGNS
-Describes natural groupings of signs that behave in analogous ways, and their classification, in terms of different relationships between the signifier (the reprsentamen) and the object for which it stands.
-An index points to something or describes a casual relationship.
ROLAND BARHES: A BRIDGE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM
-Barthes professed that no form of writing is a free expression only of the writer's subjectivity, but is the product of larger social and ideological values. H viewed writings as all style and never free of ideology; each literary work signifies literature in general, in addition to whatever content is contained within its text.
Design Project 2 - Public Service Announcement
FOLLOW UP RESPONSE PART 2
With my follow up to Mandee's response, I decided to make the changes that she had suggested which made my design stronger. It's amazing how something so small can make such a big difference. I changed the lines going through the NCSL logo, and also shifted the type over to the left ever so slightly to help have all invisible lines line up more closely.
CRITIQUE PART 2 FROM MANDEE
Your new design looks great! I really see this as a paper now , especially with the texturing around the icons. I only have a couple more things for the next critique, and they are just small:
- There is a line going through the NCSL logo, and that throws me off a bit.
- The ... goes into your margin slightly and makes the design kind of tight right there.
FOLLOW UP RESPONSE TO MY CRITIQUE
Things I changed:
- Added a new typeface
- Put a paper texture in the background to make it have a realistic feel.
- Made the figure icons have a more drawn out feel.
CRITIQUE BY MANDEE THOMAS
I like the idea that this is a note being written to parents, I feel like that really puts it into the "school" context. I think you should work to push the lined paper aesthetic even farther. Some ways you could do this is by:
- Giving the paper three holes or including the frayed edge as if it was torn out of a notebook.
- Write the type yourself
- Possibly make the icons look more like they were stamped onto the paper by adding a texture.
Reading Assignment 4
READING ASSIGNMENT 4
THE SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR DESIGN
Raymond Williams came to redefine the word for Culture; the rearm now meaning the process of human development and it became more associated with intellectual achievement, learning, and the arts.
-Raymond viewed cultural experiences as a "network of relationships," which the meaning of communication artifacts cannot be separated from the social environments and practices in which they reside. More recent theories question the notion of "one way of life" and focus on the process of meaning production and circulation, rather than on a unified vision-on how things mean rather than what things mean.
FORMATIVE AND ILLUSTRATIVE ROLES OF DESIGN
-Penny Sparke states "Design is apart of a dynamic process through which culture is actually constructed."
-The role of design is powerful. It assigns to design considerable responsibility for the transmission and production of culture.
SOCIAL SCHEMAS
-Schemas are mental structures that contain general expectations and knowledge about people, social roles, events, and places. These structures tell us how to behave and what to think in certain situations and are formed through our social encounters, in real life or as represented by the media.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT FOR DESIGN - MATERIAL MATTERS
- Materiality - or the physical qualities of a representation that give it individuality and allow it to be categorized, is an important aspect of what signs mean. The specific visual, spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, and temporal characteristics or form are content.
-Medium - Is a mode or system of communication that extends our ability to exchange meaning.
MEDIA AND TOOLS
Media refers to the character of our culture at particular times in history, as well as to our general expectations of information, how it behaves, and what it means.
THE SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT FOR DESIGN
Raymond Williams came to redefine the word for Culture; the rearm now meaning the process of human development and it became more associated with intellectual achievement, learning, and the arts.
-Raymond viewed cultural experiences as a "network of relationships," which the meaning of communication artifacts cannot be separated from the social environments and practices in which they reside. More recent theories question the notion of "one way of life" and focus on the process of meaning production and circulation, rather than on a unified vision-on how things mean rather than what things mean.
FORMATIVE AND ILLUSTRATIVE ROLES OF DESIGN
-Penny Sparke states "Design is apart of a dynamic process through which culture is actually constructed."
-The role of design is powerful. It assigns to design considerable responsibility for the transmission and production of culture.
SOCIAL SCHEMAS
-Schemas are mental structures that contain general expectations and knowledge about people, social roles, events, and places. These structures tell us how to behave and what to think in certain situations and are formed through our social encounters, in real life or as represented by the media.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT FOR DESIGN - MATERIAL MATTERS
- Materiality - or the physical qualities of a representation that give it individuality and allow it to be categorized, is an important aspect of what signs mean. The specific visual, spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, and temporal characteristics or form are content.
-Medium - Is a mode or system of communication that extends our ability to exchange meaning.
MEDIA AND TOOLS
Media refers to the character of our culture at particular times in history, as well as to our general expectations of information, how it behaves, and what it means.
Reading Assignment 3
READING ASSIGNMENT 3
FORM AND CONTEXT
- Form is that which we can shape, and context is the complement of factors that determines the nature of appropriate form.
-While the nature of the context is beyond the designer's immediate control, a primary design responsibility is to determine which factors, and how many factors, within that context the design will address.
-"When a designer does not understand a problem clearly enough to find the order it really calls for, he falls back on some arbitrarily chosen formal order. The problem, because of its complexity, remains unsolved." Christopher Alexander
-Herbert Simon described design as "action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones".
THE SCALE OF THE CONTEXT
- Communities (Interrelated Systems) - Systems (Interrelated Products) -Products (Interrelated Components) - Components
-If design is to be considered in the initial stages of developing a communication strategy, not at the cosmetic end of a process aimed at short-term profit, designers must address the contribution roles of human cognition, social behavior, culture, technology, economics, and the physical aspects of audiences and settings in the definition of design problems.
FORM AND CONTEXT
- Form is that which we can shape, and context is the complement of factors that determines the nature of appropriate form.
-While the nature of the context is beyond the designer's immediate control, a primary design responsibility is to determine which factors, and how many factors, within that context the design will address.
-"When a designer does not understand a problem clearly enough to find the order it really calls for, he falls back on some arbitrarily chosen formal order. The problem, because of its complexity, remains unsolved." Christopher Alexander
-Herbert Simon described design as "action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones".
THE SCALE OF THE CONTEXT
- Communities (Interrelated Systems) - Systems (Interrelated Products) -Products (Interrelated Components) - Components
-If design is to be considered in the initial stages of developing a communication strategy, not at the cosmetic end of a process aimed at short-term profit, designers must address the contribution roles of human cognition, social behavior, culture, technology, economics, and the physical aspects of audiences and settings in the definition of design problems.
Reading Assignment 2
READING ASSIGNMENT 2
REPRESENTATIONS
-Representations may be expressions of intangible ideas, concepts, or feelings in some physical form. They may also communicate information about tangible objects, people, or places in the real world in a different physical form. The most basic unit of the representation is the sign; which is something that stands for something else to someone in some respect.
CONTEXT OF CULTURE
-The Reflective Approach: The meaning resides in the object, person, or event in the real world and that the language system simply reflects or mimics what is already there.
-The Intentional Approach: The meaning is imposed on the object, person, or event by the author or maker of the representation. If true, we would be able to communicate through entirely private languages.
-The Constructionist Approach: The acknowledgement of the public, social character of language. This theory posits that we construct meaning through the use of representational systems that link concepts to sings.
CHOOSING AN APPROPRIATE SIGN
-Categorization: How we identify stimuli in our environment an group them in memory as members of a category, similar to others in that category and different form members of other categories. Categorization allows us to think and communicate metaphorically. We need not see the actual thing being represented, in a literal sense, as long as, to the people who are viewing the sign, it shares some important quality with the thing it stands for.
-Representational: The denotative and connotative content of the subject matter, meaning can be communicated by the representational style through which it is rendered.
-Representations sometimes communicate not only their subject matter but also meanings implied by the technology through which they are made. Such meanings are subject-matter-independent and arise from the semantic network of connotations associated with the technology itself.
ORDERING THE ELEMENTS WITHIN THE REPRESENTATION
-The visual arrangement or ordering of elements within the representation, called the syntax, also influences how we interpret meaning. We assign significance to the placement, orientation, and perceived hierarchy among elements within the visual field.
REPRESENTATIONS
-Representations may be expressions of intangible ideas, concepts, or feelings in some physical form. They may also communicate information about tangible objects, people, or places in the real world in a different physical form. The most basic unit of the representation is the sign; which is something that stands for something else to someone in some respect.
CONTEXT OF CULTURE
-The Reflective Approach: The meaning resides in the object, person, or event in the real world and that the language system simply reflects or mimics what is already there.
-The Intentional Approach: The meaning is imposed on the object, person, or event by the author or maker of the representation. If true, we would be able to communicate through entirely private languages.
-The Constructionist Approach: The acknowledgement of the public, social character of language. This theory posits that we construct meaning through the use of representational systems that link concepts to sings.
CHOOSING AN APPROPRIATE SIGN
-Categorization: How we identify stimuli in our environment an group them in memory as members of a category, similar to others in that category and different form members of other categories. Categorization allows us to think and communicate metaphorically. We need not see the actual thing being represented, in a literal sense, as long as, to the people who are viewing the sign, it shares some important quality with the thing it stands for.
-Representational: The denotative and connotative content of the subject matter, meaning can be communicated by the representational style through which it is rendered.
-Representations sometimes communicate not only their subject matter but also meanings implied by the technology through which they are made. Such meanings are subject-matter-independent and arise from the semantic network of connotations associated with the technology itself.
ORDERING THE ELEMENTS WITHIN THE REPRESENTATION
-The visual arrangement or ordering of elements within the representation, called the syntax, also influences how we interpret meaning. We assign significance to the placement, orientation, and perceived hierarchy among elements within the visual field.
