Information and Persuasion: Rivals or Partners?

Autor: Katherine McCoy
Rok vydání: 2000
Předmět:
Zdroj: Design Issues. 16:80-83
ISSN: 1531-4790
0747-9360
Popis: The best thinkers in graphic design have long held that information and persuasion were oppositional modes, representing the competing cultures of graphic design and advertising. But perhaps this long-cherished notion is no longer pertinent, especially for interactive electronic communications. So many other boundaries seem to be blurring these days including work and play, entertainment and information, and education and games; with commerce permeating everything. The conventional distinction between information and persuasion has to do with a piece's content, plus the sender's intention. Some content is understood as information and some content is labeled as persuasion, promotion, or even propaganda. In this scheme of things, information is noble. Note that Richard Saul Wurman, trained as an architect, has coined the term "information architecture" to describe the graphic design of his highly successful Access Press travel guides. This inspired the venerable graphic designer Massimo Vignelli to proclaim himself an information architect, too. This vision of communications fits well with the modernist ideal of objective, rational design. Within this paradigm, persuasion is distasteful, associated with the worlds of advertising and marketing-emotional, subjective, manipulative, and superficial. But might there be an alternative to this tidy dichotomy? Perhaps information and persuasion are not an either/or opposition. More likely, they are modes of communication that overlap and interact. The information/ persuasion relationship involves more than the type of content and the sender's intention. The reader's motivation and the communications context-the situation in which communications happens-are important factors as well. Consider two examples of what we might generally consider "information design," and how they interact with audience members at various motivation levels. An airport monitor would seem to be a purely informational condition. A traveler hurrying to catch a plane is highly motivated and will make full use of the flight monitor-no need to persuade this audience member. On the other hand, a stop sign also would seem to be highly informational with no promotional character. But when a driver in a hurry encounters a stop sign, the driver may make only a rolling pause in the intersec
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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