a graphic design tragedy

Project 2.5

Prompt: Design : An Initiation to ________ , introducing new visual conventions that might logically follow, or interrupt, if such is the more compelling strategy. Any media, any point of delivery.

My initiation involved initiating World of Warcraft players to civility. The form was a flash movie.

My plan:

• Borrow a system of conventions to speak to the community
• Corporate training video is the set of conventions used to initiate new employees
• Parody is a form players are familiar with
• Allow the introduction of possibly controversial material in a non-threatening way
• The guild sits in for the corporation, producing content to initiate new guild members

The following reflection was originally posted on our studio blog and speaks about my own work as well as that of my fellow students.

My initiation was concerned with modifying the behavior of individuals within an online community. During my research, I discovered that rudeness was an issue within the community. My conceit was an initiation into civility. The initiation I generated sat soundly on ground all members of the community were very familiar with.

When I consider all of our initiations there is a correlation between how familiar the content of an initiation is to the community and the visual conventions used and introduced. As a group the initiations for the most part made sense. They were based on need. Gamers are rude, bikers need paths, etc. As designers we identified problems to solve. This community could use X, kind of thinking. They were logical, linear. There was no internal motivation to introduce other visual conventions. It was inefficient to do so. As a group we framed it so that the only impetus to add/borrow/invent conventions was that the prompt required it. Ergo they felt shoehorned in or they were so superficial as to have not meaning. Perhaps initiations that did not respond to some perceived need, or initiations that had no intrinsic value to a community might have forced the convention issue. What would an initiation of an online fashion community into steamboat piloting look like. Or initiating one community into another. Potters initiated into the World of Warcraft. There is no evidence that our thoughtful initiations would be better accepted than a more ridiculous one. More ridiculous initiations open the door to introducing visual conventions that correspond to the foreign content. My explorations did not take me there. Everything was safe. No real challenges. I did not expect/ask anything significant from my community either visually or content wise. Is that about respect, reverence, timidity, fear, ignorance?

It is compelling to me that there is nothing in the original prompt that implies “problem”, yet so many of us went there immediately and dug in for the duration. The “problem” was to create an initiation, not necessarily identify a problem to create an initiation around.

I was interested in my design having value to the community and leveraging this value as part of my rhetorical stance. The value lie in the initiation fixing something. Did it need to be fixed? I thought did enough research to justify the initiation. It makes sense internally but does it have value to a community. The value a designer has to a community seems to be about knowing when to speak and when to listen. I think there is an element of design that is about possibilities and what might be. Good/effective design process starts broadly with umlimited options. I think there is definitely a “why not?” aspect to design that has value. But, design can address needs within a community and designers can be an asset without creating or looking for problems to solve. Communities can identify and articulate their own problems. A traditional dynamic is interrupted when designer engage directly with communities. It circumvents commercial interests which often lie more in the vein of creating and sustaining needs. I still stand by identifying a problem to solve as a viable strategy for the prompt. I see now that it was not the only strategy.

I would hope my design has a rhetorical stance, that is normally my intent. (perhaps a convention of a successful design) The rhetorical stance comes from either the project/problem/client or the stance is self authored, which was the case in this project. Both the content and the form were intended to move communities members from position to another. Or even just highlighting that their behavior is impacting others.

I have been taught that successful design is about  process. A design process is a set of conventions. What does it mean to design without process. To design without convention. Is it still design. It would seem that on occasion moving beyond conventions would have value. It feels difficult to execute on a long term basis. How many instances before a thing becomes a convention. Is it about reinventing the process for each new design. I could argue it seems counter-intuititive to have a plan before you have seen the problem, and yet this is often the nature of our process. The ability to adopt and discard conventions as needed seems optimal.

When evaluating a deliverable I need to think a design is successful. That might be the my first convention, maybe sometimes my only convention. If I don’t like it is unsuccessful. Also Working. A design that operates as intended is successful. I identified as many visual conventions as I could and incorporated almost all of them into my initiation. Some were used as-is, others broken down or reinterpreted. I am confident it would work. It solves the problem I instigated. A problem which has little to do with the prompt. The extent to which the new conventions and/or new visual language I introduced operates and adds anything is disappointing.

What is the motivation to move away from a learned visual convention strategy? Exploration, whim, necessity? Was it necessary to move away from LVCS to engage with this prompt? Introducing new or borrowed conventions is different than introducing a new strategy. The strategies are both assets and handicaps. If a designer (or design in general) is so intractable that they can’t ascertain when or be willing to move beyond the LVCS the strategies obviously become a handicap. There are also many times when these standard conventions are fully capable of providing an acceptable path to a resolution. The challenge lies in recognizing what is happening and having the power to take action. It is not often that designers have the luxury of completely starting over even upon the realization that things are not working. In this academic environment we have both the luxury of starting over and the freedom to abandon what we have learned.