Why I love Asterix

…and how it inspires my designs for social media

Except from the fact that Asterix has inspired my interest in history (both taught AND confused my knowledge on history…) and that it is a good read, Asterix has had a big influence on my design profession. Even though I’m not an illustrator, the design of communication in Asterix has influenced what I do now; a PhD in the intersection of visual communication, interaction design and social media.

The creators of Asterix were known for sending the translators in other countries a long list of how to translate all the word plays and cultural knowledge hidden in the french language, such as historic references, references to films, french celebrities and more. It is interesting because Asterix became a huge fenomenon in the world, not just in France, even though it was a very french comic - you need to read a lot about each Asterix comic to understand all the intertextual references there - but it’s still enjoyable without knowing them all. Though, what I study is the visual stuff, and I think this image is a really good manifestation of all the levels graphics and typography can play at in one image.

I find that the design of social interfaces has so far been little influenced by the design of communication (mostly done by illustrators and graphic designers), and I’m curious about why we don’t see more of this type of communicative approaches online. It seems to me that functional aspects always outshines cultural and communicative aspects.

This image communicates and creates meaning (shows Asterix' sarcasm and tone-of-voice towards the sleeping man) through at least four levels:

1) the context (by reading the whole story you will know that this man does not appreciate Asterix and Obelix)

2) the wordily content (“Garedunord, it is us”)

3) the evil facial expressions of Asterix and Obelix suggesting irony and malice

4) the speech bubble flowers indicating waking the sleeping man up in an overly not-so-nice way.

WOW.

The wordily content alone would not have made us realized the meaning of sarcasm, but in combination with the others - stuff we know as means for showing sarcasm in the real world, it guides our reading of the image.

Though, someone else could have interpreted this differently…? How we read the communicational aspects can vary from person to person, culture to culture. I base my readings of images on a social semiotic framwork, theories that help me analyze graphics and typography as resources for producing meanings.

Other images with typographic and graphic choices that shapes meaning:

Inspirational Cards as design method

A colleague of mine once told me that “Designers are thieves, they steal bits from here and there and put them together in new constellations”. This professor, Simon Clatworthy, inspired me to use a design method during my Master project (at KHiB), which I call Inspirational Cards. The most important thing about them is to extract knowledge from something that inspires me, and transfer the core of the knowledge into my own topic. I've developed the method to fit my own needs, and the cards has proven very useful also during my PhD, and this is why:

1) Initiating complex challenges: the method helped me to start working on this PhD when I had no idea what I was doing, and only had the topic youth, social media and society. In the beginning I would make a card for everything that inspired me, even though I didn't know what to do with it.

2) Research diary: The method works almost like a research diary for me. Ideas and sources of inspiration behind my theories can be tracked in time, as they all contain month/year and chronological number.

3) Mapping of how I got to my results:The cards, now around 150 of them, shows very much the way I got to my results and what I've been interested in along the way. They show inspirational sources, but also reflections, ideas and other design research.

4) Understand my project: I have layed out the cards, sorted them in different ways, just looked at them to see patterns, and used them to explain e.g. my supervisor what I'm working on. So the cards help me gain an understanding of what I'm really into, the overall patterns of my design- and research interests.

Feel free to download my inDesign-template here, but please refer to me or my PhD when using it.

Here is a selection of the cards, see close-ups on press (totally about 150 cards, as of today, august 2015):

Four categories of cards:

Yellow cards: Inspiration from others; an idea, a design, a detail or a concept I’ve come across somewhere, that somehow is relevant for my process –indirectly or directly. See for example the cards "The Confessional", "Sonder", or "The Knitting Clock".

Red: Personal reflections on process. Paradoxes, questions to myself, epiphanies.

Green: My own ideas for designs and smaller features of design. This can also be ideas developed in corporation with student assistents working on my topic.

Blue: Research discussing design concepts in some way. For research I normally keep track of it in Mendeley - a reference tool software, so this category is mostly for research that is related to visual stuff or design.

IDEO Method cards

I used the IDEO Method cards during my Master degree, and really like how IDEO works and how they make their methods accessible to everyone. This is a deck of cards with a design method on each one, and tips on how to use it in projects. And these are really not just useful for designers. They are divided into the categories Ask, Watch, Learn and Try. http://www.ideo.com/work/method-cards (they also exist as an app)

Touchpoint cards

Simon has also written an article on the use of a card-based toolkit in service design: "The card-based approach offers a tangibility that teams find useful, and that offers multiple usage alternatives."

Clatworthy, S.(2011). Service innovation through touch-points: Development of an innovation toolkit for the first stages of new service development. International Journal of Design, 5(2), 15–28.

See & read: spring 2015

I think many things I see & read – for work AND pleasure – is relevant for what I do, so I thought I'd write an overview of some of the stuff I look at (not all in-depth) nowadays.

Research

Interfaces

Eikenes, J. O. (2010). Navimation: A sociocultural exploration of kinetic interface design. Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

Morrison, A., Westvang, E., & Skogsrud, S. (2010). Whisperings in the Undergrowth: Communication Design, Online Social Networking and Discursive Performativity. In I. Wagner, T. Bratteteig, & D. Stuedahl (Eds.), Exploring Digital Design SE - 8 (pp. 221–259). Springer London. (On the norwegian social site Underskog.)

Andersen, C. U., & Pold, S. B. (2011). Interface criticism: Aesthetics beyond the buttons. Aarhus University Press.

Activity theory

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Social semiotics & semiotics

Lemke, J. (1995). Textual politics: discourse and social dynamics. (T. & Francis, Ed.)London, Bristol, PA.

Crow, D. (2010). Visible signs: an introduction to semiotics in the visual arts. Ava Publishing.

Design materials

Hansen, L. A. (2014). Communicating Movement: Full-body Movement as a Design Material for Digital Interaction. AHO.

Hallnäs, L., Melin, L., & Redström, J. (2002). Textile displays: using textiles to investigate computational technology as design material. In Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction (pp. 157–166). ACM.

Multimodal analysis

Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Edward Arnold.

Kress, G. R., & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Psychology Press.

Stuff I watch

Trees in the forest and mountains! [Hiking with my dog]

Wild - again: there are so few good and genuine stories told in popular culture on women, especially films like this one from Hollywood. Too many films portray women as beautiful wrapping with no intellectual capacity whatsoever.

Silicon Valley tv series - fun stuff

Inside Amy Schumer - even more fun

Beautiful graveyard tombstones - especially fascinated by old names and typography [walking my dog in the Vår Frelsers Gravlund, Oslo]

Enlightened with Laura Dern

Mad Men - not done with the last season yet

Reruns of old Sex and the City-episodes that I like, despite people trying to force it into the guilty-pleasure-category.

Kids making an iPhone in the mountains. Background photo of the Rondane mountains.

Project proposal – The Design of Dialogic Interfaces

PhD-school and all the hand-ins of literature review and project proposals are finally done! Though not done, of course – the project develops and changes continously. BUT; it feels good anyway, so as for spring 2015, this is my project:

the long run…

PhD-school became a long run for me due to a big crash & burnout situation after my first semester of the PhD. That's life. And doing a PhD is tough. But now I'm here, I have learned a lot, and I've manage to submit the damned proposal I hated a while back. Not just that, I enjoyed writing it as well!

I used to be afraid that doing a PhD would be too theoretical for me–I'm after all trained as a designer and love doing stuff. But now I see that this is also design. Just in a different way. The project changes all the time, new patterns and theories occurs, but this is the current proposal (valid for spring 2015, written after a bit more than a year at PhD-school):

Download project proposal PDF (April 2015)

For someone who is concidering to do a PhD, it might also be interesting to see the project proposal I handed in when I applied (if you can even recognize that it's the same project…:/

Download the first project proposal/application PDF

The proposal is written during a course lead by Tim Anstey and Cheryl Ball; the "apparatus course" that focuses on writing process, research questions, methods, analytical framework and the most important thing: red thread through it all - does it all align? E.g how does my specific research questions match the framing and analytical framework I've chosen? We have handed in and developed reading lists, to "annotated bibliographies", to literature review, into project proposal. I've probably learned most about writing processes; how to find the right words that describes what I want to study?

Abstract (from the proposal)

In this thesis, I will study the designs of commenting sections in online magazines and newspapers. These are interfaces consisting of a variety of designed choices, such as layout, typography, moderation system and a recommender system that helps us to decide which comments to read first. Within each of these choices there are many possibilities that affects our use experience, whereas few of them are explored in research. In my research, I seek to study and visualize concept designs for the holistic use experience of these choices, with emphasis on enhancing the expressive possibilities and engagement.

The framing of the project is based on the idea of designs and artefacts as producers of social and cultural meaning. Existing research in this context is mainly focused on a functionalistic approach, as opposed to the discursive and semiotic approach I adopt. What does the design mean for us, and how does the designs of buttons, layout and typography effect our use experience?

As social media and technology has expanded our possibilities for expressing ourselves in the public sphere, rational arguments and emotional stories lives side by side, communicated in the same ways graphically; same fonts and few possibilities for communicating tone-of-voice. I will view the variety of these expressions as a design material for future concept designs.

I view the variety of expressions in dialogic interfaces – such as emotional expressions, arguments, questions, suggestions and personal stories – as a design material itself.

I divide the process into three stages; 1) in the first stage I will gain knowledge and analyse existing commenting sections and the various features these consists of, 2) in the second stage the focus is on gaining knowledge on how to visualize and prototype alternative concept designs for a fictional magazine commenting section, and 3) in the third stage I will evaluate, analyse and further develop these concept designs in collaboration with experts in the field, editors and designers.

My thesis will be an article-based contribution, with three articles, based on these three stages. The project will be finished in the spring 2017.

So… WTF am I really doing?

Most people don’t have a clue of what you’re doing as a PhD-candidate (I sure as hell didn’t…), so this is a list of things I’m doing nowadays. Hopefully you’ll understand the content, but we’re working on lots of abstract and difficult-to-explain-because-I-don't-understand-it-myself-yet-stuff, so be prepared for a certain degree of vagueness…

1) Attending the PhD-school, a course of 45 credits/"studiepoeng" (about one and a half semester) with PhD-candidates from design, urbanism and architecture. It’s mostly about getting an understanding and an insight in what research is all about. A way of thinking, a mindset for how to look at things. (And that is kind of difficult to explain…) Content: Talks, workshops and tasks about reading & writing processes, orientation/positioning of your research, your viewpoint, qualitative & quantitative methods, ethnography, urbanism, academic tools, referencing, how to do design research, design materials (e.g. a computer is a material for your design), learning to critique, and writing project proposals and literature reviews.

2) A quest for the good questions. Design research is not about having one fixed question in the very beginning, sticking to it, and find the answer. It’s about all the questions that appear in the process, because the new questions that arises are a part of the new knowledge we produce.

3) Writing a project proposal & literature review. I’m writing about what my project will be about nowadays. This means that my ambitions, the background/reasons for doing the project, the research questions, the methods and the literature all has to stick together. And I’m telling you; that is not as easy as it sounds like…

4) Designing concepts. My PhD is a part of a bigger research project, the delTA project with SINTEF and Opinion. I work on design cases for our partners; Kongsvinger municipality, NRK P3, Plan Norge and Edda Media. Me and some student assistants work on ideas, concepts and visualizations for the challenges these organizations have related to engaging youth. So far we have worked on two concepts, one for Kongsvinger Kommune about a website for youth to engage and initiate hobbies and activities, and one concept for NRK P3 about youth online participation and debating culture at P3 Dokumentars website.

5) Understanding “Research by Design”. When doing design research, the design is a way of getting new knowledge. This means that I need to find research questions that are both about the knowledge I want to find out by doing design, but also questions that are about the design itself. Why is this design work relevant, and what do I gain of knowledge from it?

6) Switching between “Nina the Designer” and “Nina the Researcher”. This probably sounds weird, but being a researcher is very different from being a designer, and it’s going to take time to learn to switch between this “glasses”. I need to look at my work and how I work from different perspectives, and analyse what I do in a way I haven’t done before.

7) Thinking & trying to understand abstract stuff. That doesn’t mean a lot of staring in the wall, but working actively by visualizing thoughts. A PhD is about working on complex issues, and mapping these issues in a "gigamap" or by creating inspirational cards (my way of structuring all the inspirational sources I discover along the way) are ways of “attacking” the PhD-project as a design project. Which makes a PhD more concrete. An example is the underlying issues of the design concept for Kongsvinger, where we work to engage youth there to participate in activities. All the mental, practical and physical barriers youth have for participating in a activity or sport on their spare time are useful to map out visually, in order to understand gaps and creative possibilities. Barriers and factors that are important for youth’s participation are f.ex.
family & personal resources,
friends or the lack of friends,
group identity and personal identity,
bullying,
personal engagement,
youth culture & attitudes (example from the youth culture in places like Kongsvinger; “Nothing ever happens here in Kongsvinger”),
difficulties in transport,
money

8) Discus & reflect on E V E R Y T H I N G. Academics are known for not being able to shut up, and sometimes we discuss banal and “obvious” thing for ages. To some people it seems weird, but the most banal things have so many layers of understandings attached related to time, people, trends and usage. When I look at Facebooks brand film I look at the storytelling, all the visual choices, the rhetorics, the emotions, the voice and why they chose video as a format – all the choices they’ve made to make you understand what they intend. This way of analyzing makes me learn to look for alternative ways and alternative methods that are better suited for the main goal.

9) Investigating deep AND broad. As opposed to what many people think, I’d argue that a PhD is not just about digging very deep into a very particular and detail little theme. It’s about broadening your view and looking at your own field and its role in relation to completely different fields. As Erling Dokk Holm said in a talk at the PhD-school; “If you go very deep, you can also be very broad” – in his dissertation he looked at coffee bars as a way of studying changing aspects of urban life, and about solitude and sociality in the public space.

Why am I doing a PhD?

Curiosity, questions, feeling useful & bringing design further

For some people it may sound strange that I wanted to do this PhD, and I get that view ;) I'll try to explain why this is interesting to me:

Well - yes, there is a lot of reading of heavy articles, and yes, theoreticizing (is that even a word?) design may sound a bit boring. (Or… the last part really depends on your definition of design - in Norway most people don't talk about designing our society, it's more used in relation to estetic or functional objects or services.)

Most people who know me will describe me as a very curious person who asks tons of questions. I easily get bored of doing repetitive assignments or working on things I don't feel ownership to. But I like to challenge myself and my comfort zone, in order to learn something new. A PhD is about searching and finding new knowledge - and that is exactly what I'd like to do. That doesn't mean that I see myself as a researcher or the professor type. I'm also very interested in social entrepreneurship and business, and I see myself more as the self-employed-kind of type.

I'll probably raise and professionalize the level of how I talk about design, and I believe that is a way of getting design further, though for most designers it's a way of distancing yourself from the actual design. But in order to develop my field, I must look at my design in a meta-perspective. What is a design process, and how do we work? Only by looking at design from a different perspective, can make us able to change it. Though to be able to change anything at all, I need to communicate what I do to others. That's why I'm writing on this blog. I don't want to "hide" my future academic articles in forums where only a very limited number of people can access them easily.

During these three years, I get to read, think, work and develop new ideas on a theme I find very interesting, and at the same time useful to the society (at least that is my ambition). That is actually a very important aspect for me – I need to feel useful in some way. And I want to push our society a bit further, in a direction that I believe in.