Message Design

EDC&I 583

Steve Kerr

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

• We’ll share results when we introduce ourselves to each other

2

Introductions

• Class members

• Instructor

• The course

3

Where it all began…

4

Typographical fascination

5

Later

• Publishing• Communication

technology• Art and ideology• Online and distance

learning

• Alaska • New York• Seattle• Russia

6

Uncle Scrooge

• Carl Barks

7

8

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

9

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”

10

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

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, what’s popular– Follow “best practices” or create new ones– Look for intuitively “beautiful” approaches

11

12

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 …)

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?

13

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?

14

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?

15

16

Ways of Presenting Information(What We’ll 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

17

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?

18

Wow! This New Computer Has Lots of Great Fonts…

Part of the problem is thatWhen you mix different fonts togetherYou may lose the reader’s attentionAnd even impart a sense of confusionAre the differences supposed to make a difference?

Just what was this about, anyway?

19

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Text

20

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Organization

21

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Graphics

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Diagrams

• Showing internal structure, or process

• E.g.: David Macauley’s books– Castle– Mosque– Underground – How we work – Etc.

22

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Charts

• The XKCD “Money” chart

• Compare e-version with printed paper

23

24

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Maps

25

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Maps

26

The Heritage of Presentation Forms

Photos

27

New Presentation Forms

Visualizations – Netflix Similarity

28

New Presentation Forms

Visualizations – The Human Diseasome

29

We’ll 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?

30

The Critique

• The curmudgeon’s 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, it’s at a much shallower level…”– “We’re witnessing the PowerPoint-ization of

everything”

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

31

32

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

• I’ll do a brief example of a “redesign” presentation

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?

33

Thanks!

I’ll post this PowerPoint presentation on the course website within the next couple of days.

See you next week!

34