project #2: reflections and analysis...

Denise's assignment:

Project 2.5 : "An Initiation" Conclusions

Write a critical text responding to Project 2 results. Refer to your own approach and design outcome, of course, but also support your conclusions by referring to works done by other students, as well as published work you have found.

Following are a few of my observations/questions to fuel your inquiries.

• Overall, the initiations implicated designers (meaning you and me) as being severely entrenched in learned (a.k.a. "schooled") visual conventions strategies. Are these strategies tools? Handicaps? Assets?

• What, then, might be design's value to "communities", as compared to commercial interests? Is it our way of thinking? Our ability to isolate and present a concept clearly? The caché of "good design"?

• For the most part, the initiations did not expand (introduce new visual strategies) to the community visual language. Why is that? Were the visual conventions so conventional as to be unalterable? Did you, as a designer, feel you lacked permission to do so?

• What are your conventions for "successful design"? Is it impossible, advisable, desirable to move beyond them?

• Do you understand your design as having a rhetorical stance? What is it, and from whence does it originate?

Here is my text:

Manipulating visual conventions (really, conventions of any kind) is a tricky thing. Generally, these are established over time and agreed upon by communities or cultures. One cannot declare a convention for others with any certainty. Conventions are extremely fluid and mutable, and can be interpreted in very different ways. Because of this impermanence, manipulations of these conventions are experimental at best…designers serve as catalysts and can only predict an outcome (and are often surprised).

Our most recent MGD studio project asked us to identify and meddle with visual conventions for a specific community. I chose to examine an online community centered around food and cooking. My approach began with a deep dive into the community itself: How does it function? How do members relate to each other? How is communication achieved? What is important to the community? And finally, what does all that look like? This initial consideration of visual conventions resulted in a long but superficial list of typical online forum language: avatars, emoticons, navigation and bread crumbs, topic threads with nested comments, banner ads, etc. These are all indeed visual conventions this community engages with—many of which greatly influence the functionality and relationships of members—but none of them felt particular or specific to this online community.

Next I began to think about the visual conventions found in the act of cooking and engagement with food. This elicited ideas like measuring cups and spoons, food packaging, recipe cards, cookbooks, and mise en place (a French term meaning “everything in place”). This last convention felt very rich—I wondered if it could be used as a visual way to explain complex information to this community. Part of the assignment was to initiate something new. Members spend a lot of time on the site discussing the preparation, combination, taste and enjoyment of food—but what if they were asked to consider the nutritive content? Could the way they respond to and comprehend that information be affected by its visual language?

Using mise en place as a metaphor, I built out an image with bowls and dishes of varying shapes, colors and sizes to represent different categories of nutrition. I tried to use typography to represent the individual nutrition elements (fat, vitamin C, selenium)—applying transparency to each word and layering it within its respective dish. A fuller dish represented a greater percentage of that nutrient in the food. While this idea was compelling, in execution, the complexity of the visual language made it hard to understand the relationships between percentages and nutrients.

I discarded the specificity of the metaphor (literally, items in dishes) but retained the notion of parts to a whole, which is an integral part of cooking. My final design integrated this idea with the visual language of food packaging, cookbooks and recipe cards—culminating in an animated experience triggered when a community member views a recipe on the website. Nutrients are visually treated as products. A box for each nutrient falls into the browser frame—Fat, Carbohydrates, Protein, Sodium, Vitamin C . Each box displays the name of the “product” in typography reminiscent of processed food packaging—arched text, script fonts, bold letters, stroked type, and bright colors. Each box contains a grid of 100 small icons (a stick of butter for Fat, a package of steak for Protein, a salt shaker for Sodium), which represents the percent recommended for daily consumption. The amount contained within the current recipe is shown at full opacity, while the remaining icons on the grid are shown at a much lighter opacity—parts to a whole. The design is meant to be humorous and tongue-in-cheek. The community members love food and convey a sense of fun when they communicate with each other—I decided working with this would prove more compelling than working against it.

What felt most important in this exercise was to communicate with my chosen community in a way that would seem familiar to them, feel of them—but to also experiment with inventive “designerly” ways of doing that. This was much harder than I anticipated. How can a designer—with all her expert knowledge, jargon and prejudices regarding communication—step back and truly see the visual landscape through the eyes of a “non-expert”? Where is the line between imitation and condescension? How can the insertion of my voice as a designer compliment (and complement) that of the community? Users have definite expectations and nearly tangible comfort levels when they encounter artifacts—accounting for this and attempting to innovate within it was difficult. I struggled to clearly communicate my message while engaging the user in a memorable and emotional way.

Working in the medium of convention is something designers do every day—we weave them together and pick them apart and use them for desired effect (whether we consciously realize it or not). I believe conventions are both tools and limitations. We can employ them as shorthand to quickly gain comprehension, to suggest nuance, or even as subversion. At the same time, we always run the risk of misinterpreting how an intended audience will understand them. Convention is a blessing and a curse. Slippery, transient, nebulous—it is the very substance of society, communication, culture and humanity.