When good conventions go bad

WHEN CONVENTIONS BREAK DOWN: BRIDGING THE INTERPRETIVE CHASM

Readers responses to conventions range from those they fully understand because they have mastered the code through learning and experience, to those with contextual clues that guide their interpretations or from which they draw inferences, to those that they decipher with only partial success. Sometime they just give up. Sometimes they base their interpretations on guesswork. Sometimes they seek other resources to understand the convention more fully. Breakdowns can occur because designers misjudge knowledge and experience of intended readers or because conventions land in the hands of intended readers.

What the designer can do…

• Metadiscourse helps readers decipher convention – legends, labels, call-outs, notes– Job Map– Minimalist callouts– Murayama and Darwin

• Accommodate readers by reducing technicality (more common in the past than now)

What readers do…

• Make inferences• Compare visual elements with their

interpretation of the world the visual references (phone sign in airport)

• Use perceptual context to clarify meaning (fine print text)

Influence of conventional context on meaning

Conventions are more likely to succeed if designer and reader share an understanding of the communicative context.

Example: underlined text

• A book title• A financial total in accounting• A warning in instructions

Example: A rectangular box

• Person’s position in an organization chart• Border around a picture or a chart• Physical object like a water tank or computer

monitor

Reading intentions: Who deployed that convention and why?

• Reader must decide whether designer intended to deploy a convention AND also determine its intended meaning in a given situation.

• In any given situation, mismatch can occur between designer’s intention and reader’s interpretation

Example: Color and icons

• Color on websites: What does that color mean?

• Icons and public information symbols: Is that a garbage can? What does it mean?

• Drug labels

CONVENTIONAL BUNGLING: AT WHAT COST TO USERS?

Designers can deploy conventions incompetently because they 1) don’t fully understand them, or 2) haven’t mastered the techniques to execute them properly. Bungled conventions erode clarity and ethos.

Examples: Clarity

• Pie chart madness• Wrong texture to code materials in a

construction drawing• Placing headings closer to text above than

below• 1980s OCR typeface – Army reports in wrong

font won’t transmit

Examples: Ethos

• See Figure 6.5• Technical errors before production (see Fig. 6.5)• Reproduction errors on the back end (find

examples page 207 top)• Clashing conventions too close together (also

207)• Bar for execution set so high, average Joe can’t

get it right (207 and fig. 6.6)

INTENTIONAL MISDIRECTION: CONVENTIONS DESIGNERS DON’T MEAN

Designers sometimes intentionally misdirect readers – to achieve novelty and surprise, to build ethos or for other reasons. Misdirection uses three forms of convention – hidden, mock, and stealth. Sometimes these tactic work. Sometimes they fail because readers don’t recognize the misdirection OR they recognize but resist or reject the misdirection.

Hidden conventions

• Designer hides the conventions to preserve the seeming novelty and invention of the design.

– It’s a brochure and a poster– It’s a bra and a shopping bag

Mock conventions

• Evil junk mail

Stealth conventions

Designer disguises conventional form but maintains underlying structural integrity– College recruit brochure that resembles a passport– Any chart from the Onion Stat Shot or USA Today– Examples?

Flouted conventions

• Different kind of cookbook• Ben and Jerry’s Foundation annual report

HERMENEUTICAL FAULT LINES IN INTERPRETATION

Designer intent and or incompetence doesn’t fully account for variation in reader interpretation

Gibson’s Ecological Perception

1. People move around2. Everything people see is in a context of other

things that are also seen3. People are part of what they see

• What’s that mean? Everyone sees things and makes meaning in slightly different idiosyncratic ways

A Convention Viewed in Ecological Context

Affordances & Crutches

• Affordances are the visual elements that offer a viewer the opportunity for interpretation

• Conventions serve as crutches for making meaning – we don’t need conventions to help us communicate but they help us prop up our interpretations so we don’t have to go through the whole interpretative process whenever we encounter new visual stimuli

Example

• http://www.fastcompany.com/tag/infographic-day