When good conventions go bad
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.
WHEN CONVENTIONS BREAK DOWN:
BRIDGING THE INTERPRETIVE CHASM
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
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.
CONVENTIONAL BUNGLING:
AT WHAT COST TO USERS?
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)
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.
INTENTIONAL MISDIRECTION:
CONVENTIONS DESIGNERS DON’T
MEAN
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
Designer intent and or incompetence doesn’t fully account for variation
in reader interpretation
HERMENEUTICAL FAULT LINES
IN INTERPRETATION
Gibson’s Ecological Perception
1. People move around
2. Everything people see is in a context of other
things that are also seen
3. 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