Browsing by Person "Wood, Dave"

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A Can of Worms: Has Visual Communication a Position of Influence on Aesthetics of Interaction?
(2011) Wood, Dave
Interaction Design is a young discipline that grew out of an overlap of other science and design disciplines, its remit was the design of interactive products, services and systems for human behaviour. Visual Communication and its output of graphic design once had an early influence on Interaction Design, but this has since been devalued by the influence from more functionalist disciplines, leading to two myths about Visual Communication: it just does the ‘aesthetic bit’ on the interface, and that aesthetics has no real use or function beyond ‘beauty’. But aesthetics cannot be reduced and measured as a functionalist equation of ‘means-end’. By understanding aesthetics from a Pragmatist philosophical position, the aesthetics of interaction can be explored from a situated and culturally connected embodiment of an interactive experience. From this position aesthetics is viewed as emergent from the interactive experience through three factors: a socio-cultural context, a personal embodiment and finally a means-to-many-ends instrumentality. It is a cultural phenomenon and not an engineering problem that can be explored quantifiably. This makes this a phenomenological study, and closer to Visual Communication. The rhetorical nature of Visual Communication affords a change in human behaviour, evoking a cognitive and emotional response, making its remit about framing decision-making from use of image and text. Experience, emotion, and interpretation can only use qualitative methods to explore an aesthetic experience. This raises a more vexing question: what other design disciplines also share or rather claim a phenomenological position on aesthetics? This paper will set out to explore these amorphous boundaries to decide if Visual Communication still has an actual support position of influence on Interaction Design.
A Semiotic Rosetta Stone: Developing a Designer-centric Meta-language of Pragmatic Semiotics
(Taylor & Francis, 2017-09-06) Wood, Dave
In this paper I outline the development of a designer-centric meta-language that interfaces between practitioner and theoretician, without compromising their integrity and rigour. I express this through a Rosetta Stone metaphor and how, as a design researcher, I developed this concept when I had to pierce through Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic theory to enhance aesthetic practice. I initially found it a challenge to understand Peirce’s unfamiliar academic terminology without any prior formal education in Pragmatism or semiotic theory. The problem for designers is that theoretical language can be intimidating, arcane and opaque. In reviewing the Peircean literature I identified an absence of designer-centric literature, which would quickly facilitate designers’ understanding of Semiosis. This paper therefore is a progressive call for more concerted collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners. This would ideally lead to new designer-centric Peircean literature being published, leading to the enhancement of aesthetic creative practice.
Beating Covid: Designing Industry-led Learning
(2022-02) Wood, Dave; Gregory, Helena; Raeburn, Colin; Malcolm, Jackie
At Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design when it came to designing, Covid hit us as hard as those working in industry. As a brand-new teaching team taking over an established degree at DJCAD, we had to solve how to teach studio-based graphic design online fast. The University of Dundee had the foresight to move all teaching for the entire year online. This solved some immediate health-related safety issues but caused others. Like many design agencies, we had to adapt quickly to an online world. We wanted to replicate the spirit of the studio in our online teaching. As a new teaching team, we had the freedom to immediately write new design briefs for the students, using resources available to students in their own homes. We identified remote working as a desirable skill for employers, who have found their studio-based world changed to a digital world. As designers were in the same predicament as our students, we augmented the students’ online learning by engaging much more with design agencies in Scotland and England. This ranged from online Teams events or setting bespoke live briefs to enhance professional development. In our final year’s first three weeks London-based Carr Kamasa wrote a short editorial brief. In our penultimate year, as part of a new Agency project, Glasgow-based agencies (Good, and O Street) wrote two branding briefs. We also had subject-specific talks on Thursday afternoons by agencies such as Jack from Jack Renwick Studio, Simon from DixonBaxi, and Marina and Craig from FIT Creative, amongst many other contributors. Despite Covid, our student confidence levels rose because of these innovations that enhanced our students’ transferable skills of remote working. Already Carr Kamasa has recruited two of our graduates over applicants with more design industry experience. The implication of this is that we used Covid compromises to enhance the employability of our graphic design graduates.
Countering the Othering of Others: Illustration Facilitating Empathy
(2020-12-10) Wood, Dave
Illustrating Semiosis
(2018) Wood, Dave
The pragmatic semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce has a lot of practical benefits for enhancing visual communication in illustrations. His triadic theory of Semiosis focuses on the dynamic interrelationships between the concept to be communicated, how it is represented through a semiotic sign, and how this affects the success of how the concept is eventually interpreted. Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory uses complex language, and although Peirce is embraced in some design disciplines, the language that defines Semiosis (or sign-action) is problematic beyond academia. This paper is an attempt to address this by providing illustrators with a basic introduction to how Semiosis can help to enhance the success of the visual communication in their illustrations. This is done by translating Peircean terminology into illustrator-centric language and providing an example of how the Semiosis is implemented in an illustration. Within the limits of a short paper, illustrators can begin to understand how the triadic nature of concept/representation/interpretation can benefit them during their ideation and sketching phase to author effective images. In doing this, this paper will mostly discuss iconic, indexical, and symbolic semiotic representation within pragmatic semiotic signs of the intended concept to be communicated in an illustration. This paper's aim is to enact a pragmatic turn in illustrators, in which Semiosis theory becomes more integrated within their practical work, by providing a more illustrator-centric dissemination of Peirce's semiotic theory.
Indonesia's Emergent Global Designers
(Common Ground Research Networks, 2018) Wood, Dave
Interaction Design: Where’s the graphic designer in the graphical user interface?
(2009) Wood, Dave
This paper will, from a visual communication perspective, explore the role over the last 40 years of the graphic designer within graphical user interface design. I am specifically interested in how graphic design has had to respond to designing for interactions in the new digital media. To do this I will also examine how interactive design has impacted upon graphic design and vice versa. In order to conclude on the present position I will explore the roots and formation of the graphic design discipline formed sixty-six years prior to the formation of the new discipline of interaction design. There are parallels between the two. Focusing upon a literature review of academic visual communication literature this paper scrutinizes limited writing within it on graphical user interfaces. It analyses and evaluates the visual communication literature dialectically through a filter of interaction design writers’ selected writings. In tone and structure this paper is designed to address a proposition that has seldom been addressed fully from my chosen perspective. My research position is shaped by a desire to explore the graphic aspect of graphical user interfaces rather than from the technology/HCI/computer science disciplines. This paper adds to the discourse on how interactions can be facilitated by better graphic design in order to expand visual communication literature and application to practice. The conclusions in the paper set the context for a deeper enquiry into graphical user interfaces from a visual communication perspective, as part of my continuing PhD research.
Interface Design: An introduction to visual communication in UI design
(Fairchild Books, 2014) Wood, Dave
This book introduces the major elements of graphic design for digital media – layout, colour, iconography, imagery and typography, and shows how these visual communication basics can combine to produce positive interactive user experiences. With practical advice on improving communication between designers and developer, and a tantalizing look at designing interactivity for all five senses, this is a must-have introduction to developing interfaces that users will love.
Just So You Know: When Illustration Challenges Rape Culture
(Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, 2019-06-14) Wood, Dave
This paper focuses on a case study on re-contextualising illustration for second-rights use. The illustration works it discusses is from a year-long collaboration between Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland (RCTN), and 2nd year illustration students from Northumbria University. The paper will first outline the students’ original illustrated merchandise work for RCTN, before discussing the re-contextualising of that work into an information pack on sexual consent. This second project was funded by a ERDF Creative Fuse grant, and it brought together an inter-disciplinary team of experts from design, illustration, social science, applied science, and law to advise the re-contextualisation of the illustrations. This paper discusses the pedagogy behind how the students’ collaborated with RCTN. It then explains the decisions that were made by the steering group that led to the successful re-contextualisation of the students’ illustrations in a second-use context. Finally, one of the illustration students will reflect upon her student experience of being involved in the RCTN collaboration from start to finish. The Creative Fuse project was completed in September 2019, and RCTN are now using the illustrated work within its outreach work across the North East of England. This includes a social media campaign via Twitter, to provoke further dialogue on sexual consent using the hashtag #JustSoYouKnow. This paper will conclude by discussing the positive impacts of using illustration to challenge rape culture, by facilitating young people to become more informed on sexual consent.
Little Designer in Theoryland
(2019-09-02) Wood, Dave
This paper sets out the argument for a more proactive design thinking dialogue between designers and theoreticians, to improve the interface between theory and designers’ tacit creative practice. To illustrate this problem, it will focus on Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic theory of Semiosis, and how designers and Peircean semioticians are beginning to address the barriers around complex theoretical language. The metaphor of a Semiotic Rosetta Stone will be used to demonstrate the central argument for a development of more designer-centric dissemination of theory. Its argument will be supported by historical precedent of the use of a meta-language to bridge between the known and unknown. Such a designer-centric meta-language would refocus complex theory without ‘dumbing down,’ and help designers who are unschooled in theory to implement it more easily into their design practice, to enhance the effectiveness of visual communication design. An emerging international Semiotic Rosetta Stone network of designers and Peircean semioticians will be explored, and its roots will be mapped to the ground work of others. Outreach work with designers from 2018-19 will be discussed, especially the use of qualitative tools (such as a semiotic probe) to begin mapping designers’ tacit language to Peircean terms. The paper will then conclude with a call for more designers and theoreticians to further collaborate to build models on how theory can be applied to design practice. This would afford more freedom of movement within each other’s disciplinary territories of Designland and Theoryland.
Moving Across the Boundaries: Visual Communication Repositioned in Support of Interaction Design
(2010) Wood, Dave
This paper is a theoretical contribution to the research area of Aesthetics of Interaction, but from a Visual Communication perspective. In order to convince those that still see Visual Communication as merely style and artifice, and an internalized and subjective design process, I will use the theses of Dourish ‘Embodied Interactions’ and McCullough’s ‘Digital Ground’ to connect to current HCI research. A Pragmatist philosophical position will be adopted from which to explore this Phenomenological area. This will present the design discipline from a fresher perspective of intellectual, considered and rhetorical discourse, into a richer understanding of the discipline by dispelling two unhelpful myths. Then an argument can be made to reposition Visual Communication as a stronger influence upon Interaction Design.
Ode Stones - Lithic Illustration: A Material Engagement Approach
(Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, 2020-10-23) Wood, Dave
The Ode Stones project is a pedagogic experiment in using lithic materials to reconnect 21st century illustration students to the Stone Age roots of Visual Communication Design. Within an Interpretation and Contextualisation module, the Ode Stones project was designed to improve the students’ ideation phase by engaging them through problem-solving ‘painting’ illustrations on stone. It challenged them to interpret the poems of John Keats onto three illustrated Ode Stones, and to then create three bespoke illustrated containers for each stone. This was framed by applying aspects of Material Engagement Theory (MET) to think through action, into their design processes. This cognitive archaeological theory was developed as a cross-disciplinary framework to help understand ancient meaning-making interactions through material artefacts. This paper explores the application of MET to modern Visual Communication Design practice. From their Ode Stone project rationales; each student’s text was qualitatively coded to reveal the emergent decisions they took while engaging with the lithic materials. This focused on form, texture, situation/context and painting decisions. By applying MET to Visual Communication Design, this paper reflects on how it can offer designers and illustrators a pragmatic, phenomenological and semiotic framework to underpin their tacit knowledge.
Prehistoric Illustration: Semiotically Unlocking and Learning from Early Visual Communication
(Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, 2023-07-06) Wood, Dave
This paper aims to do three things. Firstly, it aims to make the case that the roots of illustration and visual communication stretch back to the dark cave walls during the last Ice Age. In doing so, secondly this paper orientates the reader into the basics of Peirce’s semiotic sign-action (Semiosis), as a phenomenological framework applied to illustration to enhance visual communications with a primary target audience. This will then lead to the third aim, which is to demonstrate how semiotics pervades every image in some way, whether intentionally or not. To illustrate how Semiosis works and how it can help modern illustrators to encode stronger levels of meaning in their work; we will see how Semiosis can still unlock meaning in paintings over 45,000 years old.
Re-contextualising Illustration to Inform Sexual Consent: #JustSoYouKnow
(2020-12-10) Wood, Dave
This paper will discuss two illustration projects that helped Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland (RCTN) expand their outreach across the North East of England. These were Hope Solidarity Liberation (2017), and #JustSoYouKnow (2018), which ran consecutively over 12 months with 2nd year illustration students. The first project was to produce merchandise illustrations to help RCTN to fund-raise. RCTN ran this as a competition challenge to the students, with the winning illustrator’s work being made into tote bags, mugs, and other merchandise. All the participating illustrators were rewarded with a gallery exhibition where the students could sell their work, and raise additional funds for RCTN. The second project called #JustSoYouKnow re-contextualised some of the illustrations from the merchandise competition into a new campaign to aid RCTN’s outreach work. The aim of this second project was to counter young people’s misdirection on understanding sexual consent, and to challenge prevalent myths about what constitutes rape. The illustration project lead chaired an inter-disciplinary steering group, to advise RCTN on re-contextualising the illustrations as the core for a new RCTN information pack. This steering group’s inter-disciplinary team to help develop the information pack came from design, illustration, law, forensic science and social science. Through the collegial alliance in the steering group, many new perspectives were discussed that enhanced the visual communication of the sexual consent information cards. This paper will outline how the same sets of illustrations worked across two different contexts, to positively impact on the visual communication of two different RCTN messages in support of women. Throughout these two projects, the illustrators learnt how their skills as visual communicators could be positively employed, and how a re-contextualisation of purpose opened up new communicational situations for their illustrations within real-world social issues.
A Semiotic Rosetta Stone Research Project. Defining designer-centric semiotic practice
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2019) Wood, Dave; O'Neill, Shaleph
This research project will provide a richer understanding of how a designer-centric reframing of Peirce’s semiotic theory could manifest itself. We propose to run it throughout the length of the conference with EAD’s design delegates opting in through informed consent. It will pragmatically construct a body of sensory data from a semiotic probe (a variation of a cultural probe) that participants will complete in their own time. We would like this probe to be distributed in the EAD conference goody bag at conference registration. It will feature several practical visual tasks, plus a semiotic audit section, and it would be collected during the conference. From the semiotic probe data we aim to discover how Peirce’s complex terminology could be translated into a designer-centric metalanguage. Like the historical Rosetta Stone, this data would then help designers and theoreticians to improve the communicational situation in disseminating Peircean semiotic theory.
A Semiotic Rosetta Stone Workshop: Enhancing visual communication through design semiotics
(2019) Wood, Dave
ADIM delegates will learn how the quality of user-participation can be enhanced by improving the visual communication within designed outputs. The workshop’s aim is to provide a direct, hands–on experience, to explore how iconic, indexical and symbolic semiotic representation can improve design’s message, concept or affordance. It will complement the conference sub-track 5.e Seeking signification in transformational times: design semiotics and the negotiation of meaning.
Visually interpreting experience: circle of visual interpretation methodology
(ACM, 2014) Wood, Dave
This paper provides an overview of the Circle of Visual Interpretation methodology that is workshopped during Interacción 2014. This new method uses visual interpretation techniques to phenomenologically reveal extra detail of user behaviour from within user research. The Circle of Visual Interpretation methodology is aimed at design teams engaged in designing interactions to use during their ideation phase. Through visual interpretation a dialogue between designers and their target audience is phenomenologically crafted. From engaging in this hermeneutic-semiotic process fresh understanding regarding user motivations behind user actions visually emerges. In this paper each practical step in this methodology is summarised and illustrated with examples from a user research project.
What Do You See?
(2018) Wood, Dave; Ogilvie, Sara; Middleton, Ray
This paper disseminates a student graphic novel project to the challenge stigma against people with complex needs. The project was a collaboration between Northumbria University 2nd year illustration students and Fulfilling Lives, a charitable organisation that helps vulnerable people to rebuild their lives. Fulfilling Lives’ work also includes outreach work with local social service providers to enact system change in their attitudes and policies to people who they define as ‘difficult clients.’ They believe in the value of the voice of people with complex needs, and they wish to amplify that voice to rebuild lives by enacting positive social change. Fulfilling Lives challenged the illustration students to use illustration to help amplify those voices. This paper focuses on the pedagogy behind how the students’ produced their graphic novellas, and on the students’ processes and reflections. It also disseminates the impacts of the ERDF funded project that published the graphic novellas in an anthology. The students’ illustrations in this book and eBook formed the core material for a social media campaign via Twitter, to provoke dialogue on the stigma against people with complex needs in society using the hashtag #WhatDoYouSee? It will conclude with discussing the early positive impacts of the students’ work, and some of the dialogues that the graphic novel project has already provoked.