Talking Design: Negotiating the Verbal - Visual Translation Anne Tomes, Caroline Oates and Peter Armstrong Paper for Presentation at the Second European Academy of Design Conference, Contextual Design, 21-24 May 1997, Stockholm
Address for correspondence: Dr Anne Tomes Sheffield University Management School 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 4DT Tel + 44 114 282 5328 Fax + 44 114 272 5103 e-mail
[email protected] Acknowledgement: This paper is based on a research project on the use of product market information in the Design process sponsored by the UK Design Council, to whom thanks are due. The opinions in the paper, however, are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Design Council
Abstract
As a consequence, perhaps, of the fine art influence in design education, design is commonly regarded primarily as an act of individual creation in which verbal critique and logical analysis are only peripherally relevant. Both educators and students of design can be heard describing themselves as ‘doers, rather than talkers’ whilst practising designers may regard the argumentative world of the typical business client as something with which they must deal, but would prefer not to enter. This paper is based on an alternative view of design, one in which the outputs of individual creativity are progressively negotiated to a mutually satisfactory outcome, first with other designers and subsequently with the client. In this process the ability to articulate verbal meanings associated with visual design, and conversely, to interpret verbal messages in visual terms is a core skill. Viewed in this light, the whole of the design process is directed towards the achievement of a mutually acceptable visual ‘translation’ of the brief, and it is achieved along the way through the medium of lesser translations from the verbal to the visual and back again.
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Using interview data on the design process in a graphic design consultancy working with a large financial services company, this paper identifies a number of phases in the achievement of verbal - visual translation: 1) A verbal deconstruction of the brief, in which its already succinct text was ‘boiled down’ still further, in order to obtain a core message. Either 2a) A phase of verbal punning, which yielded a portfolio of metaphoric and metonymic representations of the core message. These were then translated - often rather literally - into schematic visuals. Or 2b) The production of a visual response to the brief based on recycled images and forms which had proved acceptable to the client in the past. 3) An exploration of the client’s sense of the visual translation of the verbal, a process which involved repeated instances of: 3.1) Testing designs by displaying them without commentary 3.2) Discussions of verbal interpretations of visual designs and the production of visual interpretations of the verbal meanings as modified and elaborated in these discussions.
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3.3) The pursuit of the argument through invocations of the public’s verbal interpretation of the visual as this is perceived by designer and client on the basis of their different experience. These processes, it is argued, are not merely contingent on the fact that design happens to be carried out for clients. Fluency and confidence in the unmapped area of translation between the visual and the verbal are essential to the design process itself. It follows that this needs to be recognised in design education and in the self-image of the design practitioner. A single case study confined to the area of graphic design cannot, of course, be conclusive. The paper invites consideration of the extent to which the identified forms of verbal work may be important in other areas of visual and three-dimensional design.
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Introduction: Design and Linguistic Cultures Design as Negotiated Translation This paper had its origin in a remark on design competitions made by Mike Press, Professor of Design Research at Sheffield Hallam University. To be successful, he said, students have to learn to ‘tell the story’ of a design. This is in interesting contrast to the prevalent view of visual design as something which ought to speak for itself, and do so, moreover, in a language quite distinct from ordinary speech and writing. It prompts the question of how far ‘telling the story’ - and, by extension, other forms of verbal work - might be integral to the process of actually producing design. Such a question makes little sense so long as design is thought of as an individual act of creation. It makes every sense, however, if it is viewed as the outcome of a series of negotiations between designers and between designers and clients. This is not as unorthodox as it may sound. A stress on negotiation as integral to the design process is implicit in much of the discussion of participation in the literature of design methodology (e.g. Rittel, 1984). What tends to be missing, is a complementary discussion of its social mechanics. This paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of one aspect of the mechanics of negotiation: that they routinely involve translations from the verbal to the visual and back again.
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Since the evaluations and discussions of design between designers and clients are conducted primarily through the medium of spoken language, the implication is that translation from the verbal to the visual and back again is an important aspect of the design process (c.f. Kawama, 1987). Somehow, the words of the design brief must be realised in the form of a visual sketch. Subsequently that realisation will need to be critiqued and explained at the verbal level, and modified at the visual, until first the design team and subsequently both designers and client are satisfied that they have understood one another. Viewed in this light, the process of design routinely accomplishes the theoretically daunting task of translating meanings between two quite incommensurate languages; the visual and the verbal. The object of this paper is to sketch out a preliminary map of the verbal work involved both in ‘telling the story in design’ and ‘telling the story of design’. The material is from a case study of the relationship between a major bank and a graphic design consultancy.
The Translation Problem: Design as Extra-Verbal Creativity Both the negotiated nature of the design process and the involvement of verbal media tend to be underplayed in the literature of design methodology. Predominantly, the design process is portrayed as a mystery of individual creation, inaccessible to ordinary language, let alone rational analysis. Ward (1984, p. 233), for example, depicts the act of design as involving 'right 6
brain' processes in which imagery is non-verbal and analytic distinctions are suspended. Similarly Cross (1990) and Archer (1984), believe that ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and acting constitute a form of intelligence quite distinct from the verbal and analytical. Similar views are expressed by design practitioners themselves. The following is from an interview with Richard Powell, of the well-known design consultancy, Seymour-Powell: If design, as an activity, can be located on two continuums engineering/art and logical/intuitive, then we are definitely at the art and intuitive ends of the spectrum. That way you think about what a product is rather than what it's made of; if you follow a logical path you will always end up with a predictable solution but if you arrive at solutions intuitively they can be equally good or better but for unpredictable reasons. Seymour Powell p. 114. The manner in which design communicates, as well as the process by which it is created is depicted as incommensurate with the verbal and analytic. Thus Richard Seymour later in the interview quoted above: The X-factor in the product is its essential personality, its desirability quotient, if you like - those intangible, emotional features, over and above function and efficiency, that make one product better and more 7
desirable than another. It's the first thing that strikes you and it often makes itself felt in an immeasurable fraction of a second. It's the "I like it, I want it, what is it?" element in a product. We're constantly searching for that elusive iconography, the psychological bridge between consumers as they are and consumers as they'd like to be. Given this stress on the irrational and extra-linguistic in both the creation and the workings of design, it is not surprising that there are difficulties in establishing the kind of linguistically-encoded knowledge base on which design professionalism might be based. According to successive speakers at the 1995 4D Dynamics Conference held at deMontfort University, designers tend to believe that ‘if something is true, it cannot be stated.’ (Wood, 1995) and to valorise the individual creative act uninformed by systematic knowledge (Allison, 1995). The latter attitude was neatly exemplified by the very next speaker at the same conference: 'Sometimes if you don't know what's been done in the past, you may stumble on something.' (Morgan, 1995) Although Coyne and Snodgrass (1991) have criticised the individualism, mystification and elitism implicit in these views of design, arguing (as we do here) that design is actually a co-operative inter-subjective activity, and one which participates in the hermeneutic character of all human thinking, the 8
belief that design and verbal intelligence are quite distinct remains largely intact. Certainly it was evident in the exchanges between designers and product managers observed in the course of our fieldwork. In the following extract, a senior designer from the design consultancy compares notes with one of the bank’s product managers: Senior Designer: When you lot have a presentation, it's all verbal, isn't it. You stand there with nothing really, just talk about the product, how you got from a to b. I find that incredible, really, that someone has to stand there in a room in front of 30 people and just and talk and talk and communicate that way. For us, it's so different, because we just do it visually and we don't really have to speak an awful lot. Our work speaks for us. It's visual, it's definitely a visual thing, so even when you're presenting to a client you don't have to prepare yourself as to what you're going to say too much because a lot of it is visual. It's a totally different way of presenting. For designers, if you have to go and give a lecture, it's horrendous, it can be frightening. You don't work like that. Product Manager: We have to really sell [our ideas]. I'm not a very creative person, but I know when what you present is right for the brand or the product. I can sense it. But the branch managers won’t have that instinct, so when you're writing a staff guide or you're writing
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a campaign plan, which we do every sort of 2 months, it has to be word for word stuff. It really spells it out for them what we're doing and why we've got where we are. As a designer, the senior designer’s business is communication through the designed object. To her, a verbal accompaniment to this process would at best be an irrelevance and at worst a distraction. The product manager, on the other hand, is a manager in a large and relatively impersonal bureaucracy. her medium, consequently, is explicit instruction, both written and verbal. They meet as representatives of quite different cultures. Senior Designer: But like you said, when we were in that situation, we were actually thinking of logos or straplines or whatever for 10 minutes. Then you go and stand up at the front and explain the idea for each one and I just found that so bizarre. We don't do that. We would come up with the logo on a piece of paper and we'd just present them, that's how we would communicate. Product Manager: Yeah, we are quite vocal. To these designers and product managers, then, verbal and visual cultures involve quite different modes of thinking. Each appears to be a little in awe of the expertise of the other, and quite ready to disclaim it on their own behalf. The question of how they can come to understand one another is therefore a real one, whatever the underlying similarity of hermeneutic 10
process. More, if verbal and visual thinking are fundamentally incommensurate, how do design teams themselves accomplish the acts of verbal - visual translation on which the critique and development of their work depends? The aim of this paper is to identify key processes by which translations from verbal to visual and visual to verbal are accomplished in the progression of a design from brief to final acceptance. The material is from a case study of the relationship between a graphic design consultancy and a major client. Since it has not yet proved possible to follow a single product through the entire design process, semi-structured interviews with the designers and the bank’s product managers have been used to build up a picture of the manner in which designs are initiated, criticised, developed, explicated, and finally accepted. Before proceeding, a word of caution is in order. In what follows, verbal work may appear to be more prominent than the visual. Insofar as this may serve as a corrective to the ‘mute genius’ view of the designer, this may have its value. It is important to realise, however, that on this issue, the methodology is inherently imbalanced. Although interview methods are quite orthodox in qualitative social science, they cannot be neutral on the question of the relative prominence of verbal and visual processes. Both the media of data collection and the presentation of the findings favour the
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verbal at the expense of the visual. For this reason, it should be stressed that our exploration of the role of negotiation and translation in design should not be read as an attempt to minimise the role of the visual imagination.
Encapsulation: identifying the brief’s core message From what has already been said, it will be apparent that we are viewing design as a process of translation from the verbal to the visual. In this the brief is fundamental, since it contains the initial definition of what is to be translated. This is explicit in the following extract from a publicity brochure produced by the design agency: . . . . the ideal - the designer’s Holy Grail - is an idea so completely appropriate to the particular set of circumstances brought together in the brief that it couldn’t possibly be used by anyone else or in any other situation. There’s only one place to look for this kind of idea. Within the brief itself. . . In our case study agency at least, the process of translation does not begin by sketching visual responses to the brief, as one might expect. The first step is to re-work the brief itself at the verbal level. A senior designer with the agency explains:
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Senior Designer: Well, basically, what we always do, we go through the brief and see what the main selling point is. I mean, the problem with this [particular] brief in a way was that there was so many good points that you've got to really single out one thing that, hopefully, can stand out above everything else . . . But these are the initial concepts, we did keep them very very simple and to the point . . so we came up with three. Before I show you the visuals, actually, I'll show you my scribbles . . . I sometimes find it easier to start with the words and try and summarise in some way, verbally, what it is they're trying to say, because it's quite hard, when you've got so much to say, to get it down to a little nugget. So I got quite a few that's just bits of words and trying out different ways of saying the same thing and then different ways of representing that visually. This initial verbal re-working of the brief was not peculiar to this one designer; it was a procedure endorsed by the director of the agency, since exactly the same method was outlined in the agency’s brochure: Very loosely graphic design consists of concept and expression. Theoretically these are two distinct stages in the design process: first you sit down and come up with a single pin-sharp concept that perfectly embodies the essence of whatever it is you want to communicate; then
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you search for the best way to express it, using colour, type, photography or any of the many other tools of our trade. and: . . . often designers are presented with something like a shopping list; a number of more or less unrelated elements all of which must be seamlessly incorporated into the finished product. In these circumstances, what's needed is a "vehicle" - not a fast car in which to escape but a core idea which can be developed and manipulated in order to accommodate all the various subsidiary points which need to be made. p. 56 Once identified, the core concept embodied in the brief not only served as a starting-point for the designer’s creative play, it also became a disciplinary device, a benchmark, against which the developing realisations of the concept were continually evaluated. The following extract is from an interview with the agency director: . . . And how we assess the creative solution is to refer back to that sentence and say, ‘Does this, with the use of colour and images and words, does it make it more interesting than simply saying it?. Does it
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make it more powerful. Does it get the message across better, or have we strayed off somewhere? Are we not making that point? Having boiled down the brief to a core (textual) message, the next step was to explore means of communicating that message in visual form. Here too, however, work at the verbal level often preceded the visual.
Making ‘routes’ In the house language of our case study agency, the series of increasingly refined visual translations of the core message of the brief was called a ‘route’. Basically the establishment of a route required two things - an act of creation to bring it into being, and an act of recognition in which the development potential of the route was assessed as viable. Word-play on the core message of the brief was prominent as a method of creating candidate routes. A senior designer with the agency was showing the interviewer some initial sketches for the graphics to be incorporated into the mailshots for a new credit card. The core message was the low interest rate: Senior Designer: Oh dear, some of them are more interesting than others. The things that never get to the client, these are quite funny. There's cheap plastic, so that's like a hair roller, a bucket, all made out of cheap plastic. And then there was like the lowest APR, which was
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like a sausage dog. So we had some very cheap plastic, some very cheap plastic. Notice that the visual translation of these verbally-defined possible routes was quite literal. All of the play on the core concept of the brief (‘low’ in this instance) took place at the verbal level. The subsequent translation into visual terms was straightforward. Thus a credit card with a low interest rate was first punned as ‘cheap plastic’, and then literally instanced by illustrations of hair rollers and plastic buckets. If a potential route created by such means appeared initially convincing (see page 22), illustrated word play of this kind would be used to generate a whole family of related translations of the brief’s concept. This procedure appeared to be quite common, Whilst insisting that potential routes could be created in a variety of ways, another senior designer with the agency, still offered the verbal pun as her first example: Senior Designer: There isn't like one formula to come with a design idea. It can be the main message you want to get across, it could be, er, word association sometimes, just the way words make a particular suggestion or it could be a particular image that's summed something up, or comes to mind. We have lots of different routes that we go down, really. We don't just have like a set way of working.
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The agency’s brochure provides further instances of literally - translated word-play as a means of generating routes. Full-page line drawings of an ass in a lawyer’s wig and a pen and ink (rhyming slang: stink) were offered as examples. In these instances it is clear that the imagination of the designer was not working solely or even predominantly at a non-verbal level. Nor was the act of creation achieved by the suspension of analytic distinctions, as suggested by Cross (1990), since such distinctions are precisely the raw material of word play. Against this, we do not wish to suggest that word play was the invariable or even the predominant means of developing the core concept of the brief. A key route in the development of one design centred on visuals of a golden eagle. In part, this was intended as a response to the brief’s specification of a ‘masculine’ image for the product, a translation which could only make sense at the visual level, since the actual sex of these creatures is not immediately apparent to the inexpert. The other reason for the choice of the golden eagle, interestingly, leads us back into the territory of the verbal pun, since the name of the financial product included the word ‘gold’, itself a metaphor of imperishable value.
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Recycling Visuals Some routes which appear to be purely visual translations of the brief’s core concept may, in fact, be the outcome of past, verbally negotiated translations. Negotiations of this kind will be discussed presently (page 25). Meanwhile, bearing in mind that a successful route is one which ends in a design acceptable to the client, it makes sense for designers to base new designs upon visual translations which have proved acceptable in the past. In effect such designs are able to draw on an experientially-based repertoire visual signification which has been negotiated in the course of an ongoing relationship between designer and client. This might be though of as a kind of verbal - visual ‘dictionary’ which is private to the parties involved, provided that the dictionary metaphor is not understood in an overmechanical fashion. In our case study, the bank and the agency had worked together for about eight years and the visual styles jointly developed by the client and the agency had been formally stabilised in a reference manual. The manner in which these visual elements could be used to produce visual responses to new design briefs is illustrated in the following extract from an interview with an agency designer: Senior Designer: These are the standard bank cards. A decision was made a while ago to look at all the bank's standard cards together, so that's why they've all got this symbol on, which we use sometimes as 18
the bank's secondary symbol, and just vary the colour . . . sometimes the imagery that the bank has already, we have to work with. The rationale for such a manual from the bank’s point of view is explained by the agency director: Interviewer: Is there some kind of manual that you’ve built up to use with the bank? Agency Director: Yes, that’s not unusual. It’s a corporate identity manual. And it’s really so there’s consistency across, everything that is produced by the bank. But from the agency’s point of view, consistency of style also means that new designs produced within that consistency are likely to prove acceptable. Long-term designer - client relationships, then, enable designers to draw upon a repertoire of visual form which has already been negotiated and agreed with the client (Cami Aziz, 1996). This may be one of the reasons for the agreement amongst both design researchers and practitioners that such stable relationships are desirable (Bruce and Morris, 1994). In our case study, matters had gone further, in that the agency - client relationship had developed into a quasi consulting role on the corporate identity of the client. In this respect it could be said that the agency influenced the design briefs which it was required to meet:
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Agency Director: . they describe us as guardians of their corporate identity, which isn’t just making sure that we’ve used the right type faces and the logo’s in the right place. It’s a wider role than that. Every now and then we sort of take a step back and say, ‘Are we different? Is this difference coming over in the literature and everything we produce? Is that really getting through to what the customer sees? A few years ago, we went for a look round the branches just to see if it was visible, you know. We went round quite a few branches without announcing it, just to look, when you walk in, ‘Does it seem different?’ Where the designer - client relationship has progressed to this point, designers may be able to satisfy the client by developing their own past work. On the other hand, they may be able to draw on the outcome of negotiations between the client and other designers. The agency’s publicity handbook gave examples of visuals originating with the client, such as re-workings of company logos and designs based on architectural features of company headquarters. All of these appear at first sight to be purely visual responses to the core message of the design brief. In reality they incorporate histories of the negotiations through which designer and client have reached mutual
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understandings of their conceptions of the correspondences between the visual and the verbal. We turn now to an examination of these negotiations.
Developing design: negotiating translation To repeat, we are viewing design as the achievement of an agreed translation from the verbal to the visual. This characteristic of design partly defines the means by which it is achieved. Once a possible route is produced, it is developed and refined through a complex series of negotiations which take the form of a search for agreement on the mutual translatability of the verbal and the visual. Unlike translation between different
verbal
languages,
however,
differences
of
opinion
and
misunderstandings cannot be resolved by reference to a determinate dictionary. For the verbal and the visual, there is no such thing. Instead the negotiators have to search for commonalties in their respective understandings of the translatability of the verbal and the visual, and build on those. The process is one of experimentation in which verbal interpretations of the visual and visual realisations of the verbal are offered to the other party for critique and modification. It is akin to the hermeneutic concept of design as a dialogue with a design situation (Coyne and Snodgrass, 1991), except that the dialogue in this instance is with the client’s emergent understanding of how his or her message might be communicated in visual terms. Because of the iterative nature of the 21
negotiation and adjustment of design, the sub-processes involved do not take place in a set sequence. Rather they tend to recur throughout the progression from the identification of a potential route to the agreement on the final design.
Testing In practice design must work unaided. For this reason, there are interludes throughout the development of a design in which it is displayed without comment or explication. The intention is that the observer (fellow designer or client) should experience the design as would its intended public and so be able to provide a verbal report on that experience. The test, in other words, is of whether the design engages as intended with the public’s sense of the verbal meaning of the visual. For this to work, it is important that the observer does not know, or is able to clear from his or her mind, the (verbal) rationale behind the design. This is why explication tends to be excluded from the moment of display. Though such moments, and the rationale behind them, were discernible in our interviews, it was also noticeable that they tended to take the form of brief interruptions in the flow of verbal discussion. A senior designer with the agency, and a product manager with the bank, discuss the evaluation of trial designs: Senior Designer: I think it's how something communicates. If it works at the beginning, if we understand it and the client understands it, 22
without having to explain it too much . . . Quite often, when we present something, we won't really talk on and on about it, build it all up then show it. . . Product Manager: No, you don't, you tend to just . . . Senior Designer: You tend to just get it out and wait for the reaction and then start discussing it. You shouldn't have to build it up or have lots of reasons why you've done it. It should just communicate, really, and if it works like that for the client, it will work like that for the customer. Product Manager: I think when an agency starts to do that when they come in and they talk and talk they're not sure whether what they're presenting is right for the client. Senior Designer: They're trying to justify it and really you shouldn't need to know all that information. Product Manager: No, it should be clear. What you're trying to do when something's passed across to you, [is ask] ‘Does that communicate?’. Because when that comes through the door and you open it up and you give it a couple of seconds and if it doesn't communicate . . Senior Designer: It's lost, it's wasted.
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The moment of mute display, then can be brief. You ‘wait for the reaction and then start discussing it.’ We will examine the nature of this discussion in a moment. Meanwhile we should point out that the identification of silent display as a sub-process within the development of designs does not imply that all displays will be mute. There can be reasons quite unconnected with testing which lead designers to explain themselves. Here an assistant product manager describes the reaction of the agency designers to a silent audience. Interviewer: Do they just show their work to you without explaining what they’ve done? Assistant Product Manager: No, they generally explain it, they generally talk through it. Maybe they should do it that way. I think the more quiet that you are, the more they tend to talk because they don’t know what you’re thinking, so they tend to talk through what they’ve done. It could be that the designers in this situation interpreted silence as scepticism about their capabilities, or even their sanity. Explaining themselves in these circumstances could be an attempt to demonstrate the rationality of their interpretation of the brief, rather than an attempt to sell it as such.
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The Search for a Common Verbal -Visual ‘Dictionary’ Whilst the silent display of a design may be appropriate as a test of whether or not it works, it offers, in itself, no guide to the manner in which it might be developed. For that, it is necessary for the observer to articulate a reaction. In the first instance, this necessarily takes the form of a verbal translation of the visual. The mismatch, if any, between this interpretation and the designer’s intentions then forms part of the material from which the design must be developed. In the second instance, the observer may be able to enrich this material by outlining an alternative visualisation of the designer’s intentions, and this is probably the main reason why these tend to be discussed after the display of a design (see the second statement by a senior designer in the interview extract on page 23). In the following extract the process of visual trial, error and verbal feedback is illustrated from the negotiation of a credit card design between the bank a charity affinity partner: [some] charities aren’t so clear [about their image] and it makes our job a little bit harder because often we have to find lots of different ways that we think it will work but it’s only by finding out what they don't want that you find out what they do want by a process of elimination. . . What I ended up doing with [a charity] is sending a lot of designs down and getting their feedback and just sort of initial feedback to tweak it
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and we eventually had a committee meeting at [the charity] whereby all the directors sat down, were shown all the creatives. They came back with feedback which knocked it into some kind of final shape and we’re at the stage now where, the feedback received from the director level will be knocked into a final mailpack and that will go to the managing director and he will sign it off, which will happen on Monday. Or might not! Keep smiling! The phrase ‘feedback which knocked it into some kind of final shape’ is interesting. It implies that the mismatches in the verbal-visual translations between the agency and the charity affinity partner were only resolved by the entry of the directors of the charity into the process of visual design, at least to the extent of selecting elements from the visuals offered by the designers. In general, the search for a common understanding of what constitutes a visual realisation of the message of the brief needs to be conducted at both verbal and visual levels. As is explained by one of the bank’s product managers, the designer’s particular contribution to such exchanges is the ability to produce quick schematic sketches of possible visual renditions of the verbal: I often bring our designer to meetings so he can listen to what [a charity] are saying. It might just trigger something off, and it has
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actually. It’s good to have people that you’re working with there, because, I think it motivates them a bit more as well. They’re involved in it rather than just being brought in at the end . . . sometimes it’s good to have him there because when someone doesn’t know what they want it’s good to have someone creative in the room who can articulate things as we go along, and it gets things going. Whilst its mixed media character is not explicitly recognised, this kind of negotiation is described in some of the literature of design methodology. Cross (1990) for example writes of trial design as a means of clarifying the client’s definition of the problem, whilst Broadbent’s ‘conjectures and refutations’ model of design participation expresses a similar idea. It also has affinities with Coyne and Snodgrass’ (1991) view of design as an hermeneutic exploration of a ‘design situation’, provided this is understood as defined by the social relationship between designer and client.
Rival conceptions of the consumer In our account so far, designers have appeared as both active and passive. They appear as active in their exploration of the client’s sense of translation from the verbal to the visual, but passive insofar as their designs are an attempt to conform to it. If this were all, disagreements over the merits of a design would last only so long as the misunderstandings of the client which
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gave rise to them. It was quite evident from our fieldwork that designers could be much more obstinate than is implied by such a picture: Assistant Product Manager: It can become especially difficult when you tell an agency that is not what you want and they still come back with it. And they represent it to you with a different angle. It can get very annoying. It wastes your time and your money. Or their time and their money as well. Interviewer: Why do they do that? Assistant Product Manager: Because I think they do believe in it, they really believe in it. And although you say it’s not appropriate, they change it ever so slightly, just tweak a little bit. It’s because they really believe in it and because they often don’t think that your thing is right and it might not be, design is very subjective, what you like and don’t like - but we’re the customer at the end of the day, and we have customers to please at the end of the day. At first sight, this looks as if the designers were attempting to manoeuvre the client into accepting a design against their better judgement. Though conceivable, this is scarcely in the designer’s own interests. Even if the design succeeds, the client may suspect it could have been better, and if it fails, the blame will certainly fall upon the designer. What is more likely is that designers ‘belief in’ a design is based on a conviction that it will 28
communicate with its intended public. Their experience, after all, is not just of producing designs, but of observing their subsequent reception. When designers speak of something that ‘works’, therefore, they are not simply articulating a preference, but claiming knowledge of the reactions of the public. Here, the agency director explains the evaluation of potential routes produced in response to a brief : Ideally it ends up with what in advertising is called a proposition, which is the single most important point. So that is what we would focus our creative thinking on. It would be a sentence, hopefully. And how we assess the creative solution is to refer back to that sentence and say, ‘Does this, with the use of colour and images and words, does it make it more interesting than simply saying it? Does it make it more powerful? Does it get the message across better or have we strayed off somewhere? Are we not making that point?’ As was mentioned in our earlier comment on this interview (page 14), the assessment of possible interpretations of the brief is guided by this sense of what ‘works’ as communication. It is difficult, indeed, to see how designs could be developed in any other way. It follows that the practice of judging the public response is integral to the practice of design. The problem for the negotiation of design is that this habit of judgement is not something which can simply be switched off in the presence of the client. The consequence
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can be an obdurate conviction that the client has got it wrong illustrated in the interview with an assistant product manager on page 28. Albeit on a different basis, the client can be just as confident as the designer of his or her own assessment of what will communicate with the public. Here, a product manager with the bank, articulates this conviction to an agency designer who was also present at the interview: Product Manager: I'm not a very creative person, but I know when what you present is right for the brand or the product. I can sense it. This is a claim to an expertise based on a knowledge of the product market rather than experience of the impact of design in general. It also hints, interestingly, that a lack of creativity may be an asset in judging the likely reception of a design, since it could facilitate empathy with a public which is assumed to be similarly uncreative. What needs to be resolved in such cases is a disagreement over the visual translation of the verbal, as it exists in the mind of the public. The outright exercise of the power of the purchaser, is one means of settling the question, as in the interview of page 28. This is obviously a second best solution, however, since it simply suppresses the input of the designer on the point. Negotiating the question to a mutually satisfactory resolution, on the other hand, involves all of the difficulties of resolving personal differences in the verbal-visual dictionary, with the additional complication that it is the 30
dictionary as it exists in the mind of the public which is at issue, not the perceptions of the participants themselves.
Implications The major implication of this study is that the self-image of designers is in some respects at odds with the manner in which they actually work. As was illustrated in the introduction (page 9), the graphic designers in our case study tended to regard the verbal culture of their clients as alien to their own, predominantly visual practice. Nor is this self-concept confined to graphic design. Recently, the authors have attended a number of conferences at which design practitioners of all kinds have prefaced their remarks which such disclaimers as ‘I’m not really used to talking about my work.’ and ‘I’m a doer, not a talker.’ As against this, it is clear from our interviews, that verbal work is an integral part of all phases of the design process. Much of this, furthermore, takes the challenging form of a search for commonalties between designer and client in the sense of translation between the verbal and the visual. One has only to read a small sample of art criticism to gain a sense of how difficult a task this can be, and yet it is one which is routinely accomplished in the negotiation of a visual interpretation of the design brief. In order to achieve this, designers need not only to be able to articulate the intentions behind
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their own visuals, but to interpret the visual intentions implied by the verbal utterances of the client. Though these may not be informed by the expertise of the designer - and the product managers in our case study were quick to disclaim any such expertise - they need nevertheless to be respected as constraints on the interpretations of the brief will be acceptable. This is not simply a matter of ‘giving the customer what (s)he wants’. Rather, it is a development of mutual understanding in which the designer enables the client to articulate what (s)he wants in visual terms. Nor is this a one-off process. In a stable designer - client relationship such as that observed in our case study, each new design both draws upon and adds to the store of mutual understanding. In the metaphor we have employed, it adds to the designer and client’s private dictionary of translation between the verbal and the visual. This, it was clear from our case study, was an important asset. Frequently it enabled the bank’s product managers to pick up a phone, brief the agency in a few words and expect to receive a satisfactory design at very short notice. It seems to us that the important ability to move fluently from the verbal to the visual and back again was developed on the job by the agency designers, and was also somewhat hindered by their view of themselves as uneasy in a verbal culture. It is as if young designers view design as a primarily a matter of individual self-expression, which just happens to take place in an
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employment context which involves relationships with the client and with other designers. If, on the other hand, these relationships are regarded as integral to design, as is increasingly recognised in the literature on design participation (Page, 1972; Broadbent, 1984; Rittel, 1984; ), the skills of verbal - visual translation must also be recognised as integral to the design process. From this point of view, ‘Talking design’ is design.
References Allison, B. (1995) Plenary Remarks at
4D Dynamics Conference. De
Montforte University. 21st September. Archer, L.B. (1984), Whatever Became of Design Methodology, Ch 5.5 pp. 347-349 in Cross, N. (ed.) Developments in Design Methodology. Chichester. Wily (for the Open University). Broadbent, G. (1984), The Development of Design Methods, Ch 5.4 in Cross, N. (ed.) Developments in Design Methodology. Chichester. Wily (for the Open University) pp. 337-345. Bruce, M. and Morris, B. (1994), Managing External Design Professionals in the Product Development Process. Technovation. Vol. 14, No 9. pp 585599. Cami, Aziz (1995) Interview. The Shape of Things to Come. in Design. Winter 1995. pp. 10-13. 33
Coyne, R. and Snodgrass, A. (1991), Is designing mysterious? challenging the dual knowledge thesis, Design Studies Vol. 12 No 3 pp.124-131. Cross, N (1990), The Nature and Nurture of Design Ability. Design Studies. Vol. 11, No 3, pp. 127-140. Kawama, T. (1987), A Semiotic Approach to the Design Process., in Umiker-Sebeok (ed.) Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale. Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 57-70. Morgan, J. (1995) Conceptual Kiosks. Paper Presented at 4D Dynamics Conference. De Montforte University. 21st September. Page, J (1972), Planning And Protest. in Cross, N. (ed.), Design Participation, Academy Editions (Proceedings of the Design Research Society's Conference, September 1971) pp.113-119. Rittel, H.W.J. (1984), Second, Generation Design Methods., Ch 5.2 in Cross, N. (ed.) Developments in Design Methodology. Chichester. Wily (for the Open University) pp. 317-327. Seymour, Powell (n.d.), Seymour Powell Publicity Brochure. (Reprint from Car Styling 70 & 89. Ward, A. (1984), Design Cosmologies and Brain Research. Design Studies. Vol. 5 No 4 pp. 229-237.
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Wood, J. (1995) Paper Presented at 4D Dynamics Conference. De Montforte University. 21st September.
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