Encoding and decoding my own work
In the business lecture I had this week, we were discussing the way a designer will have a message and encode that message in a design format easy enough for anyone to decode including people who are not creative in their thinking.
I am going to analyse a pice of my studio work, based on the Shannon and weaver model of communication...
The sender, me is getting across a message, first a bit of background information...
As part of my studio work on the brief ' a conversation' I am looking at the way we do everything for acceptance and create virtual self’s to feel better and stay out of the zone of bullying and being singled out, we want to be the same as everyone else. I am promoting that its ok to be different not everyone needs to be in the same category and I’m showing this using a theory from young and rubican, categorising everyone in society under 7 categories...
1. Struggler
1. Succeeded
3. Aspirer
4. Resigned
5. Mainstream
6. Explorer
7. Reformed
Here is a poster I have created in order to portray this message for the aspirer category.
The message is now clear but the way I encode this message onto the design needs to be done well so it can be decoded at the other end and understood. Although this poster isn’t complete without the set, the point can be made.
The idea of an aspirer is about dreaming and 'aspiring' to be something to be more, I used the blue colour to see that as it connotes to the sly and looking up, which is what the character in the poster is doing. The speech of ‘I aspire to be more’ is his and its swirling around his head. The work aspirer is also on there. This could be seen as a cop out but without this I wanted to see what people thought. Part of my idea was to have the posters linked as 'every human seeks acceptance' therefore this was always going to be on there.
So I showed this to a few people this was the transmitting stage, when they looked at the poster and gave their response we were at the decoding stage. I was told that the colour connotations were good and that although the text was placed in a good place again connoting the idea of dreaming, the text at the bottom did seem a bit of a cop out as it showed them exactly what he was meant to be. I was also told that although the idea of the boy looking up is good and clear it could also be took as him looking smug, the idea was to be lightly smiling about the future.
This transition period is where 'noise' appears. Noise is what happens between the transmitting stage, this is because many people can take the design in different ways and also the way in which its being communicated could cause interference for example if this poster was put on a billboard and paint was splashed on the text, would the message still be as receivable.
Other things that can affect the way designs are perceived is the location of where it’s read or the vision of the person reading it. Inside and outside lighting effects everyone’s vision as well as colour being different to everyone.
After all the feedback this is when they received the design. I think the message was sent well because people thought the aesthetics were good as well as the message being clear, not just in one part of the design but in may parts. This was something we were told also in a business lecture, never let your designs have only one way of communicating the message.
