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    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    Engendering Interaction with Images

    By Audrey G. Bennett

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    About this ebook

    No longer passive spectators of images, these days we are more likely to be active participants in their production, distribution, and consumption - which raises important questions about the consequences of widespread user interaction on meaning, communicative effectiveness, and society at large. In this groundbreaking book, visual communication expert Audrey Grace Bennett argues that engendering interaction with images actually improves their effectiveness by enabling images to convey meanings effectively across cultures. At the cutting edge of the visual and communicative arts, this book represents a welcome challenge to the way we think about how images convey meaning.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIntellect Books Ltd
    Release dateJan 8, 2012
    ISBN9781841506678
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Author

    Audrey G. Bennett

    Audrey Grace Bennett is associate professor of graphics in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. She is the editor of Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design.

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      Book preview

      Engendering Interaction with Images - Audrey G. Bennett

      Engendering Interaction with Images

      Engendering Interaction with Images

      AUDREY G. BENNETT

      First published in the UK in 2012

      by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road,

      Fishponds, Bristol,

      BS16 3JG, UK

      First published in the USA in 2012 by

      Intellect

      The University of Chicago Press

      1427 E. 60th Street

      Chicago, IL 60637, USA

      Copyright © 2012 Audrey G. Bennett

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Cover design: Audrey Bennett

      Copy-editor: Heather Owen

      Book design and typesetting: Audrey Bennett

      ISBN 978-1-84150-289-2

      Printed and bound by Hobbs, Tatton, Hampshire, UK.

      for Marcel

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Image Credits

      Chapter 1: Introduction

      PART I: ECOSYSTEM

      Chapter 2: Image

      Chapter 3: Effectiveness

      Chapter 4: Interaction

      PART II: ENGENDERING INTERACTION WITH IMAGES

      Chapter 5: Collaborative design through active interaction

      Chapter 6: Collaborative design through active interaction with a dynamic image

      Chapter 7: Computer mediated collaborative design of a static image

      Acronym Glossary

      Notes

      Index

      Colophon

      Acknowledgements

      I would first like to thank the following professional colleagues and former students who did not hesitate when granting me permission to use their images to illustrate my arguments: Jason Desjardins, Yehuda Duenyas, Katie Franceour, Steve Liska, Andrew Rarig, Ashley Rio, and Omar Vulpinari. I give special thanks to The MIT Press, Inderscience Enterprises Limited, and Transformative Dialogues for granting me permission to reprint my previously published articles in updated form for this book. This book is the result of over fourteen years of collaborative interdisciplinary research on images with scholars in computer science, anthropology, sociology, engineering, and technical communication. Thank you Dr. Sal Restivo for asking me the key question—What is wrong with this image?—in reference to a photograph of Kismet on the cover of Discover magazine. By responding to that question I took my first step towards understanding the important role user research plays in the communication design process. Thanks to Dr. Ekaterina Haskins for sharing a useful writing strategy—aim for 500 good words a day—that helped me to get to the finish line with this manuscript; and, thanks also to Dr. Tamar Gordon, Raymond Lutzky, Gaines Hubbell, Dr. Jay Zalinger, Janice Darling, and Kaitlyn Tebordo Wood for intriguing conversations as I wrote this book. I also wish to express sincere gratitude to Intellect for its enthusiastic support of my manuscript. Specifically, I want to thank May, Melanie and James for being accessible, helpful, and professional throughout the process. I am most grateful though to my husband and colleague Dr. Ron Eglash, an anthropologist and social justice enthusiast who continues an inspiring fight to correct social wrongs in math and computing education. Because of him, I am now deeply committed to improving changing the world through communicatively effective images.

      Image Credits

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      7.   Meta-poster image © Nathan Porteous, Chris Kerr, Katie Francoeur, Andrew Emerson, Alix Broomfield

      Chapter 4

      14.   Virtual Bead Loom simulation software © Ron Eglash

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 1

      Introduction: See. Change.

      The word image comes from the eleventh-century Latin ‘imaginem’ which means picture, statue, idea, copy, and appearance.¹ Most dictionaries today define it similarly—as both a verb and a noun with cross-disciplinary usage within mathematics, computer science, communication, art and physics. Engineering, the social sciences and other science disciplines use the word image as well. Consider scientific visualization (an emerging sub-discipline focused on the visual display of complex, technical information) and visual anthropology (a sub-discipline of anthropology that studies ethnographic images). Within interdisciplinary discourse, we can find perennial intellectual debates on what constitutes an image from disciplines like literary criticism, art history, theology, and philosophy²—all of which use images differently. Thus, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell appropriately visualizes an image as a family tree that branches out into a range of categories including graphic (from art history), optic (from physics), perceptual (from multiple disciplines), mental (from psychology and epistemology), and verbal (from literary criticism).³ In Mitchell’s family tree, each category branches out into a set of sub-categories that form a cohesive visual unit. His family tree visualization shows a kind of kinship between different image types that helps to facilitate understanding of what constitutes an image across disciplines. It also begins an important dialogue on the role of images as an evolving perceptual, cultural, technical and historical phenomenon within society. In Chapter 2, I leapfrog from two of Mitchell’s categories—optic and mental—into a broader re-categorization of images that reflects the influence of technology and globalization. My aim is to redefine image to be more inclusive of the rainbow of images in use today and explain how an image communicates meaning through a system that depends on stakeholders, familial characterization, cultural aesthetics, and context. In other words, an image exists as an ecosystem (see Figure 1) comprising:

      Figure 1: Image ecosystem depiction that shows resilience and ability to evolve represented by the stoic stance of a slab- serif letterform.

      How an image ecosystem communicates meaning has been the subject of scholarly debate for many decades. Faigley et al.,⁴ for instance, believe that the act of communicating with images is similar to the rhetorical act of communicating with text. They essentially argue that an image is text. However, the opposite is more accurate: text is image. That is, text is a written or typeset group of words that comprise letters that are visual symbols with phonetic sounds associated with them. As Saussure describes it, the written word is a graphic representation of language⁵—an image. And, while we cannot reduce all images to text, many of the theories we use to analyse how text conveys meaning can also be used to analyse images. For instance, as the rhetorician moves (movere), instructs (docere), and delights (delectare),⁶ the communication designer also uses images to inform, entertain, or persuade the user to adopt or change a belief or behaviour. Consider the image in Figure 2 that aims to evoke a change in behaviour by showing the negative ramifications of smoking through the package design.

      Figure 2: Show the Truth, World No Tobacco Day Campaign

      If we look specifically at twentieth-century, literary criticism we find a rich reservoir of interrelated and evolving perspectives on how images communicate meaning. Consider the image of a simple red circle. From a Saussurean perspective, this image is a sign comprising a signifier (its form as a red circle) and a signified (a concept or idea it represents) where the relationship between the signifier and the signified is an arbitrary one.⁷ The arbitrariness of the relationship between the signifier and the signified is most likely influenced by the culture of the user and communication context. As the late design historian Philip B. Meggs notes:

      The interpretation of a

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