Information or Cybernetic Theory of Communication
- Shannon and Weaver Bell Laboraties (1949)
Evaluation of model:
+ Good for researching how effectively your work communicates, as a designer.
- Linear process, not concerned with meaning which is a socially mediated process.
This model can be used to show effective communication by replacing each step with:
- Info. source with Client.
- Transmitter with Designer.
- Receiver with Media Outlet.
- Destination with Target Audience.
Three levels of potential communciation problems
Level 1: Techinical
- Accuracy
- Systems of encoding/decoding
- Compatibility of systems/ need for specialist knowledge.
Level 2: Semantic
- Precision of language.
- How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?
- What language to use?
Level 3: Effectiveness
- Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to?
- What can be done if the required effect fails to happen?
- Japanese bikes (Honda): used communicative methods with consumers to improve bikes.
Systems Theory
+ Can switch between mathematical, biological, psychological and sociological frames of reference.
BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board)
- Categories - men, women , children, categories, housewives.
- Further divided in to social class and age.
- Social class is determined by the household, rather than the individual.
Class:
AB - Higher (A) Middle Management, Administrative, or Professional (B)
C1 - Supervisory, Clerical and Junior Management.
C2 - Skilled manual workers.
DE- Semi-skilled and unskilled workers and non wage earners.
* The top two categories are sometimes classes as 'upmarket' and the latter as downmarket.
Semiotics
- Semantics: addresses what a sign stands for.
- Syntactics: relationships among signs.
- Pragmatics: studies practical use.
Semiosphere
- Semiotics examines signs as if they are part of a language.
- Problem: semiotics in clothes portrays a message, however may have just woke up and shoved something on.
- Levi Strauss - ethnography - myth, kinship rules.
- Lacan - unconscious; psychology 'language is first of all, a foreign one'.
- Trainers - bought to send signs 'money and coolness' - how object (material) used in contemporary society to create cultural value.
- Advertising uses semiotics 'buy this and it will do this for you'.
- Panzini - great e.g. of semiotics. -Codes: linguistics and image.
- Works for visual language too e.g. signs.
Danger (Red Triangle) + Plane = Airport Sign
[Danger to alert those in the proximity in which the incoming aircraft fly at a very low altitude over a road]
Phenomenological Tradition
- Process of knowing through direct experience. It is the way in which we understand the world.
- Phenomenon - refers to appearance of an object or condition in one's perception.
- A failure in communication can be seen as an absence of, or failure in human relationships.
- Phenomology reacts to the 'Embodied Mind'.
- Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system starts with an awareness of the body.
- Face recognition - based on life experience.
- Process of interpretation is central.
- Unlike semiotics, where interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition - interested in what is real for the person.
No comments:
Post a Comment