Advanced Communication Design

Instructor

Kim Erwin

Lead with knowledge.
Clarify your message.
Build in redundancy.
Tailor your content to your audience’s interests and needs.

These are just some of the tried-and-true principles of effective user-centered communication design. As thoughtful designers, we know it’s not just what we say but how we say it that helps people internalize our message. And even remember it later when they might really need it.
But the internet, among other elements in our daily information network, has dramatically altered the frame of our experience. Nicholas Carr, in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, hyperbolically titled “Is Google making us Stoopid?,” offers early evidence that the way we think (and therefore the biology of our brains) is changing in response to online technologies. This wouldn’t surprise 1960s media scholar Marshall McLuhan, says Carr, who persuasively theorized that media do not just channel information to us, media shape the way we process that information.

In light of this, it seems timely and important to rethink our output. And to challenge current communication practices: the linear presentation of data, bulk knowledge-transfer experiences, evidence-driven communication objectives and bullet pointed distillations.

Course objectives

In this class, we will
… analyze and synthesize an existing consumer data set for findings with the help of guest researcher Diane Fraley, who has pioneered online qualitative research methods.

… use this data set and findings to create new ways to communicate user research that challenge the conventions of research reporting.

… explore the potential of non-linear, random-access media to create persistent representations of consumers that designers and marketers can return to for new insight over time.

… survey current research reporting techniques—frameworks, collections, narratives, lists, ‘care abouts,’ etc.—and consider formats that we might add to our toolkit: wikis, blogs, consumer maps, ‘dummies’ guides, DK guides, posters.

… exhume important principles of visual representation from the likes of Jacque Bertin and Edward Tufte.

Format & Grading

Format
Visual experimentation and execution is the objective. As a result, the class will be largely studio, dialog and critique, punctuated by experiences and lectures intended to open up thinking or reintroduce classic theory to ground our efforts.

Prerequisites
This is an advanced design class: students must have completed core user research classes and accumulated some experience and skill in information design.