Message%20Design

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Message Design

• EDCI 583
• Steve Kerr

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Before We Begin

• What is one key question you hope that this
  course might answer for you?
• Spend a minute or two thinking about this write
  your answer down
• In small groups (3-4 people), share your
  questions, and see if they generate new ones
• Well share results when we introduce ourselves
  to each other

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Introductions

• Class members
• Instructor
• The course

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Where it all began
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Typographical fascination
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Later

• Publishing
• Communication technology
• Art and ideology
• Online and distance learning

• Alaska
• New York
• Seattle
• Russia

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Uncle Scrooge

• Carl Barks

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Why Is Message Design Important?

• How things are shown influences how people
  understand them
• Experience, assumptions, culture, traditions -
  all influence perceptions
• Media of presentation are not usually significant
  in and of themselves (no magic bullets)
• Technology, message forms, and popular culture
  interact in strong, unpredictable ways
• Today More mediated info in more settings ?
  people need to learn how to interpret

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Where Is This Important?

• Where is it not? Think about
• All written / graphic material (textbooks,
  handouts, etc.)
• Data presentation and analysis
• PowerPoint presentations
• Web site design
• Signage maps and wayfinding all kinds of
  explanatory info
• Animations, visualizations to support learning
• All sorts of persuasive messages

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How Important Is This?

• Sometimes, not very if motivated, people will
  learn under really bad conditions
• Sometimes, very poorly designed materials
  interfere with learning, lead to misconceptions,
  mistakes, errors
• e.g., drug overdose deaths in hospitals traced to
  bad label design warning systems at Chernobyl,
  Three Mile Island
• Sometimes, hard to say preferences and past
  experience lead to differential effects

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How Should We Approach This?

• Experimentally
• Good social science approach
• Test hypotheses about design experimentally
• Use resulting principles consistently
• Artistically
• Look at what designers do, whats popular
• Follow best practices or create new ones
• Look for intuitively beautiful approaches

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What Questions Can We Ask?

• Does message design affect our cognition?
• Print culture
• Associated with rise of modernity in Europe
• Film and TV
• Reduced scene length led to greater tolerance for
  attention shifting
• Television
• More and longer exposure led to perception of
  increased social threat
• McLuhan suggested that these kinds of media
  effects were the message
• (But difficult to prove this empirically )

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Questions Specific to Education and Learning

• Do well-designed representations help learners
  overcome preconceptions, develop accurate mental
  models more rapidly?
• Does better presentation of information help
  people solve problems, work together more
  effectively?
• Do visualizations of complex information help
  people move more quickly to more sophisticated
  understandings?

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Other Kinds of Questions

• Does interface design give us a false sense of
  being able to process more information than we
  really can? (E.g., multi-tasking - Cognitive
  load now a focus).
• Does the current vogue for breaking up text into
  small chunks lead over time to lessened ability
  to think about issues in a deep or sustained way?

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Still More Questions

• Does increased access to complex and dynamic
  representations lead to improved understanding
  and learning, or does it just confuse us?
• Do advances in technology (think GPS systems in
  cars and on cell phones) kill otherwise useful
  message-comprehension skills (think map reading)?
• Should we ever trust a photo anymore to be a true
  depiction of reality?

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Ways of Presenting Information(What Well Do
Here)

• Text (print typography and its heritage)
• Maps, Graphics (graphs, diagrams, charts, tables)
• Pictures and Photographic media
• Visualization (video, animation, sound, computer
  interface design)
• Critique Messages for what?
• Accessibility, web site design, educational
  implications, etc.
• Emerging perspectives

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The Heritage of Presentation Forms Typography

• Does the shape and style of letters make a
  difference to understanding?
• What about this? How much could you read without
  getting tired?
• Letters without serifs adfgjlmpqrtuvwy
• Letters with serifs adfgjlmpqrtuvwy
• What about the size of text?

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Wow! This New Computer Has Lots of Great Fonts

• Part of the problem is that
• When you mix different fonts together
• You may lose the readers attention
• And even impart a sense of confusion
• Are the differences supposed to make a
  difference?
• Just what was this about, anyway?

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The Heritage of Presentation FormsText
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The Heritage of Presentation FormsOrganization
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The Heritage of Presentation FormsGraphics
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The Heritage of Presentation FormsDiagrams

• Showing internal structure, or process
• E.g. David Macauleys books
• Castle
• Mosque
• Underground
• How we work
• Etc.

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The Heritage of Presentation FormsCharts

• The XKCD Money chart
• Compare e-version with printed paper

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The Heritage of Presentation FormsMaps
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The Heritage of Presentation FormsMaps
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The Heritage of Presentation FormsPhotos
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New Presentation Forms Visualizations Netflix
Similarity
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New Presentation Forms Visualizations The
Human Diseasome
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Well Also Think About

• Where should this take us next?
• How should we use new ways of showing
  information, visualizing processes and
  transformations, to encourage learning?
• Are we really becoming better with this stuff, or
  is it just reducing our ability to focus?
• What do we need to beware of?

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The Critique

• The curmudgeons perspective
• Why do people really need to know how to read
  all these complex visual images?
• Everybody just wants to reduce everything to fun
  graphics
• People now read so much less, and when they do,
  its at a much shallower level
• Were witnessing the PowerPoint-ization of
  everything

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The Counter-Critique

• Culture does not stand still, nor does it often
  reverse itself once a new message form gets
  developed and introduced
• With technological development, people become
  sophisticated producers and designers of their
  own messages
• This produces serious shifts in and challenges to
  the canon of received forms, approaches, ways
  of representing the world

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For Next Week

• Develop your ideas for paper/project, come
  prepared to share (OK to have 2-3 at this point)
• Read Tufte, Williams, look at Lupton web site,
  and read other article(s)
• Look for positive/negative examples
• Ill do a brief example of a redesign
  presentation

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Questions to Think About

• Do you always use the default font on your word
  processing program? If you use different ones,
  how do you choose, and for what purpose (effect)?
• When/where (in your experience) does typography
  make a difference?
• Examples of books, web sites, other materials
  where typography facilitated or hindered learning?

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Thanks!

• Ill post this PowerPoint presentation on the
  course website within the next couple of days.
• See you next week!