Visual Connections (Asynchronous Session)
A Visual Experiment in Cross-cultural Dialogue
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Jicha
PLACE is a visual experiment in cross-cultural dialogue between two artist/designers: one from the mountains of North Carolina, USA and the other from Santiniketan in West Bengal, India. This paper discusses this collaborative project, which involves a mix of private and public voices represented and composed as messages through a combination of drawings and photographs. Through its continuously evolving structures and semantic vocabulary, the complete form of the project reflects a multi-dimensional language experience.
Brand with Purpose: Discover a Brand’s Deeper Meaning to Drive the Development of Its Visual Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephen Zhang
Since the 1960’s, the definition of “brand” has expanded from merely visual assets, such as logos, to an integrated structure that incorporates intangible elements, including purpose, value, expression, personality, and relationship. The resulting brand affects both the cognitive and emotional responses of the target audience, thus creating a strong connection with them. In practice, design professionals have been challenged to develop methodologies to define brands with deeper meanings and to use those meanings to guide the creation of all visual assets. This case study presents a major brand identity project that demonstrates how the purpose of the brand was articulated through storytelling and how design assets aligned with the brand purpose.
Pictographic Symbols for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games: Tracing Origins in Ancient Chinese Writing Scripts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard Doubleday
While social and cultural forces contributed to the decline of graphic design practice and education in favor of political propaganda messages in China, reforms in the Chinese economy beginning in 1978 played the key role in driving the country’s economic revitalization. This study examines the way in Min Wang (b. 1956) and design teams based at leading Beijing universities, the Art Research Centre for the Olympic Games (ARCOG) at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and Tsinghua University—exemplified the changes in Chinese graphic design in light of the economic reforms beginning in 1978. The design teams produced sports pictograms based on ancient Chinese writing scripts for the XXIX Olympiad. Olympic identity systems are part of an important development of symbol systems for international and multilingual audiences in graphic design history. A Chinese creative visionary who led the development of the Beijing Olympic graphics program was Wang, a graphic designer who assimilated aesthetic principles, through the medium of graphic design, the art of Chinese writing, and cross-cultural design to blend elements of contemporary Western design and traditional visual arts in China. This study concerns itself with the creation of new Chinese artifacts which are produced in digital form. The presentation will examine the question of how and why Wang and the design teams’ development of extensive design standards sets their work apart in a quest to reaffirm the Olympic spirit by straddling the divide between China and the West and follow in the tradition of Olympic pictogram designs.
The Image and the Technological Affect: A Phenomenological Study from the Perspective of Visual Communication Students and Practitioners View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Marotta
Rapid advances in computer and internet technologies have enabled the ubiquity of photographic images because of the speed at which images can be created, altered, duplicated, disseminated, shared, and consumed. ‘Images are ‘everywhere’. They permeate our academic work, everyday lives, conversations and dreams’. These advances in computer technology have introduced a variety of modes of consumption for images many of which are intrinsically linked to particular communication technologies. There has been a shift from traditional print based media such as books, magazines, and newspapers toward computer-based communications using an ever-growing array of devices. It is within these environments that the photographic image is deployed as a communication aid. This paper explores the significance of images now as elements of communication within the rapidly changing online environment through a phenomenological lens and a mixed methods approach. Opinions have been sought from two sample groups: visual communication professionals and students, about whether or not their apprehension or visual comprehension of photographic images is affected by the medium of communication, specifically comparing print and online formats. Are we becoming blinded to the reading of images because of excessive image intake? Perhaps we have become more sensitised and selective in what we choose to engage with and visual literacy is becoming more sophisticated. This paper’s scope is limited to a comparison of subjects’ responses to two-dimensional photographic images within the Australian Geographic website and the Australian Geographic magazine.
Finding the Found Through Reflective Design : A Workshop in the Making View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marty Miller
This paper analyzes the potential of reflective design frameworks to inform discussion into image ontology. To do so, a Found Photo workshop is analyzed for its constitutive frameworks amid the changing ways that photographs exist in relation to decisions implicating visual communication and interaction design. These have impacted the ability of photographs to accrue meaning in contemporary culture in Hong Kong, where the workshop takes place. Traditionally, photographs create memories in their physical form. Yet they have now been unleashed to expand the potential for communicating in more diverse ways. To do so, the ontology of found photographs are used to apply a burgeoning discussion about experimental photography to practices of noticing. Still in its infancy, this theory needs reflective design approaches to devise how to situate discourse within the practice of both photo-taking, and photo-viewing in everyday life. The workshop to be analyzed involves an overlap of contemporary visual theory with a design approach specific to the needs of those who now take photos daily. This calls for methods which reveal the context of looking through the deixis of photographic image use and discourse. The inclusion of found photos necessitates an investigation into the moment of finding. As a result, the tertiary relations between contextualized visual representation along with the embodied act of looking can be brought to light. Discussion then implicates reflection on the perception of design artifacts as much as it does the limitations and potential of reflective design itself.
