Friday, October 30, 2009

Reading Brief:Berlo Communication Model, This Means This/This means That, etc

Berlo
     The Berlo Model of Communication to me represented the analytical side of design and communication before execution. It reminds me of western civilization vs. eastern civilization when eastern artists teach you to take time to reflect and meditate on what the core essence and  meaning behind what they are painting represents, while the western  artists just teach how to wear a beret and smock and paint just what you see. The model of communication relates greatly to eastern civilization when it ask every question: who, how, what, where, and why.

Who is the client or viewer,

What are you trying to communicate to he or she,
What sort of attributes does this certain client have,

Which messages are hierarchically relevant to the goal,

How are you going to clearly communicate to this type of viewer,

Where and when is the appropriate setting to communicate to the client,

And the most important - Why is there a need for this thing, whatever it be.

Out of Source, Message, Channel, and Receiver - the model I found most interesting is the fifth verbal communication skill in Source... Attitude. The encoding and decoding of thought or reasoning must be isolated from emotions or feelings in order to successfully communicate and to solve the problem at hand. Whether it be bias of cause, product, audience or channel, in the end it will hinder progress and be a detriment to clarity and communication from step one.

I believe Berlo is more effective in asking questions than answering them and uses reductive reasoning to clarify the process of communications.

This Means This
     This means this is a brief analysis of receiving information and making conclusions within the correct contexts. Like in fine art, iconography and iconologyy have two completely different meanings. Iconography is the symbolic meaning behind a specific image such as a woman wearing blue represents the color of the sky and the virgin Mary as the queen of heaven. The iconology behind it represents the contexts within the time or culture it is present in. The typical royal blue is built from Lapis Lazuli, an expensive mineral that represented wealth, status, and respect within its time.
The swastika in the read holds two completely opposing meanings (positive and negative). This text explains the definition of symbol and that we cannot understand a word without defining it first.


The Education of a Graphic Designer
     The Education of a Graphic Designer is a collaboration of separate views from what type of education is more beneficial to a design student. The word Contrarian comes up when the argument between academics being an asset to the end result of a design education or if concentrated design theory and studio classes, is the only way to stay focused and successful within the field.
I tend to agree that all classes, academic and studio, are beneficial to a designer, however using academics in place of more studio time will eventually be a distraction to the application process and present a clear message in an awkward or diffused way.
Academics also represent a concept without an output, while design acts as a harness or a concept vessel for that idea to transfigure from the immaterial into the material. In other words, the ideas are electronic signals and design is a television screen that makes those electronic signals and create an image and sound that is a tangible thing without abstraction.

The Education of a Graphic Designer: System Levels
     To me this reading brought multiple levels to the solving process of design. It put a new spin and different perspective to how we design and the integration of our field with the consumer, relative fields, and different applications. I can now think back to my last project of Hermann Sherrer Fine Tailored Clothing, the possibilities of comparing it to other products at that level such as automobiles; clothing as fine as a Mercedes or Jaguar's and creating joint venture campaigns, building more off of specific materials and different garments. Using the economic class of the targeted audience, different types of clothing, different materials, and joint ventures create a dynamic brand (or the Products level) and then can be taken to the next level of marketing the integration of relative brands and fields, and so on (System and Community Level). The reading gave me a new sense of how analytical designers have to be and go beyond the appropriate appearance (or Component level) of the look and read. Its like Milton Glaser said in To Inform and Delight - "Designers don't have an obligation to make something look pretty to the audience, we have a responsibility to the function and practicality in society."

A Communication Primer: Eames
     To me the Eames video helped me in an audio and visual sense to understand Berlo's Model Of Communication a lot easier. So for me this was just a further iteration of the Berlo reading.

From Theory to Practice
     These two pages communicate the comprehension of the target. Noise interrupts the read and understanding of the message, sometimes it is understood but in a handicapped process or end result. From what I got out of the read is that as designers we need to clearly define what we are communicating, whether it be which words we choose and how many times we say it (redundancy), if those words can be condensed for simplicity in clarity (entropic) also could have the negative effect of eventually becoming redundant or incomprehensible to a specific type of audience (ethnic, region, etc). We need to just observe and analytically choose how far we can add or subtract to the message for the greater good of the audiences comprehension.

No comments:

Post a Comment