Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    Engendering Interaction with Images

    By Audrey G. Bennett

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    No longer passive spectators of images, these days we are more likely to be active participants in their production, distribution, and consumption - which raises important questions about the consequences of widespread user interaction on meaning, communicative effectiveness, and society at large. In this groundbreaking book, visual communication expert Audrey Grace Bennett argues that engendering interaction with images actually improves their effectiveness by enabling images to convey meanings effectively across cultures. At the cutting edge of the visual and communicative arts, this book represents a welcome challenge to the way we think about how images convey meaning.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIntellect Books Ltd
    Release dateJan 8, 2012
    ISBN9781841506678
    Engendering Interaction with Images
    Author

    Audrey G. Bennett

    Audrey Grace Bennett is associate professor of graphics in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. She is the editor of Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design.

    Related to Engendering Interaction with Images

    Related ebooks

    Art For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Who Needs Design?

      Jun 1, 2017

      Design is an investment, not an expense. But it’s not uncommon to hear startups claim that they value design, but are going to wait to engage a design team later: “We need design, but we just can’t afford it right now.” “Maybe after we launch our M

      2 min read

    • Article

      Made from Memory

      Aug 8, 2019

      Made from Memory
      1 min read

    • Article

      Confident Colour

      Aug 19, 2021

      Confident Colour
      4 min read

    • Article

      Airea D. Matthews: Texting with Anne Sexton

      Mar 22, 2017

      For the second installment in a monthly series of interviews with contemporary poets (read part one here), Peter Mishler corresponded with poet Airea D. Matthews. Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series

      7 min read

    • Article

      When No One Knows Your Genre

      Feb 13, 2023

      When No One Knows Your Genre
      9 min read

    • Article

      Conversations

      Jan 24, 2021

      Conversations
      4 min read

    • Article

      Science Should Be Totally Beautiful

      May 4, 2016

      Felice Frankel lives between the lines. Along with being a part-time science photographer, she’s a researcher at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “As a photographer,” Frankel says, “I loo

      3 min read

    • Article

      How We’ll Forget John Lennon

      Jan 10, 2019

      A few years ago a student walked into the office of Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. Hidalgo was listening to music and asked the student if she recognized the song. She wasn’t sure. “Is it Coldplay?”

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Sticky Social

      Jul 1, 2019

      “Social responsibility is not a ‘feel good, do good’ add on.” – Julie Eizenberg “Architecture is a social medium.” This simple statement underpins all of the work of Koning Eizenberg Architecture and its founding directors, Julie Eizenberg and Hank K

      6 min read

    • Article

      Spaceship Earth

      Dec 8, 2020

      Spaceship Earth
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Bongard Problem

      Jun 4, 2018

      This text adopts the form of a Bongard problem, which is a kind of puzzle with two sides. In Bongard problems, the viewer is meant to decipher the singular difference between two sets of geometric forms. They have been used as a way to illustrate met

      6 min read

    • Article

      James Clar on Pierre Huyghe

      May 11, 2022

      James Clar on Pierre Huyghe
      3 min read

    • Article

      Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man

      Jul 11, 2019

      Today the alkaline desert is quiet. The roar of techno music and flamethrowers has been replaced with the soft clink of rakes and trash cans. Thousands of people put aside their hangovers to methodically clean the desert. After a dedicated communal c

      12 min read

    • Article

      Kerb #28: Designing For Coexistence In A Time Of Crisis

      May 2, 2021

      Kerb issue 28, titled Decentre, addresses the seismic disturbances of 2020, a year of catastrophic bushfires, an ongoing global pandemic and increasing awareness of systematic inequalities across race, gender and class. This is all underpinned by the

      4 min read

    • Article

      Art In The Anthropocene

      Mar 12, 2019

      Art In The Anthropocene
      7 min read

    • Article

      Next Up... Zen Teh

      Apr 1, 2022

      Next Up... Zen Teh
      4 min read

    • Article

      Pottery: A Tool for Cultural Preservation in Some Niger Delta Traditions

      Nov 1, 2019

      Indigenous art forms have become part and parcel of today’s cultural development. It is the symbolisation processes that were replete with physical qualities in traditional civilisation. These attributes are found in clothing, housing, objects of rel

      13 min read

    • Article

      Puzzling Evidence by Liam Oxlade

      Jan 23, 2022

      Jury citation: Puzzling Evidence is an aptly titled devotion to the ordinary and disregarded architecture of everyday life. Through an exquisite filmic narrative, it tells the story of four (apparently) public buildings in the outer Melbourne suburb

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Engendering Interaction with Images

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Engendering Interaction with Images - Audrey G. Bennett

      Engendering Interaction with Images

      Engendering Interaction with Images

      AUDREY G. BENNETT

      First published in the UK in 2012

      by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road,

      Fishponds, Bristol,

      BS16 3JG, UK

      First published in the USA in 2012 by

      Intellect

      The University of Chicago Press

      1427 E. 60th Street

      Chicago, IL 60637, USA

      Copyright © 2012 Audrey G. Bennett

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Cover design: Audrey Bennett

      Copy-editor: Heather Owen

      Book design and typesetting: Audrey Bennett

      ISBN 978-1-84150-289-2

      Printed and bound by Hobbs, Tatton, Hampshire, UK.

      for Marcel

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Image Credits

      Chapter 1: Introduction

      PART I: ECOSYSTEM

      Chapter 2: Image

      Chapter 3: Effectiveness

      Chapter 4: Interaction

      PART II: ENGENDERING INTERACTION WITH IMAGES

      Chapter 5: Collaborative design through active interaction

      Chapter 6: Collaborative design through active interaction with a dynamic image

      Chapter 7: Computer mediated collaborative design of a static image

      Acronym Glossary

      Notes

      Index

      Colophon

      Acknowledgements

      I would first like to thank the following professional colleagues and former students who did not hesitate when granting me permission to use their images to illustrate my arguments: Jason Desjardins, Yehuda Duenyas, Katie Franceour, Steve Liska, Andrew Rarig, Ashley Rio, and Omar Vulpinari. I give special thanks to The MIT Press, Inderscience Enterprises Limited, and Transformative Dialogues for granting me permission to reprint my previously published articles in updated form for this book. This book is the result of over fourteen years of collaborative interdisciplinary research on images with scholars in computer science, anthropology, sociology, engineering, and technical communication. Thank you Dr. Sal Restivo for asking me the key question—What is wrong with this image?—in reference to a photograph of Kismet on the cover of Discover magazine. By responding to that question I took my first step towards understanding the important role user research plays in the communication design process. Thanks to Dr. Ekaterina Haskins for sharing a useful writing strategy—aim for 500 good words a day—that helped me to get to the finish line with this manuscript; and, thanks also to Dr. Tamar Gordon, Raymond Lutzky, Gaines Hubbell, Dr. Jay Zalinger, Janice Darling, and Kaitlyn Tebordo Wood for intriguing conversations as I wrote this book. I also wish to express sincere gratitude to Intellect for its enthusiastic support of my manuscript. Specifically, I want to thank May, Melanie and James for being accessible, helpful, and professional throughout the process. I am most grateful though to my husband and colleague Dr. Ron Eglash, an anthropologist and social justice enthusiast who continues an inspiring fight to correct social wrongs in math and computing education. Because of him, I am now deeply committed to improving changing the world through communicatively effective images.

      Image Credits

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      7.   Meta-poster image © Nathan Porteous, Chris Kerr, Katie Francoeur, Andrew Emerson, Alix Broomfield

      Chapter 4

      14.   Virtual Bead Loom simulation software © Ron Eglash

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 1

      Introduction: See. Change.

      The word image comes from the eleventh-century Latin ‘imaginem’ which means picture, statue, idea, copy, and appearance.¹ Most dictionaries today define it similarly—as both a verb and a noun with cross-disciplinary usage within mathematics, computer science, communication, art and physics. Engineering, the social sciences and other science disciplines use the word image as well. Consider scientific visualization (an emerging sub-discipline focused on the visual display of complex, technical information) and visual anthropology (a sub-discipline of anthropology that studies ethnographic images). Within interdisciplinary discourse, we can find perennial intellectual debates on what constitutes an image from disciplines like literary criticism, art history, theology, and philosophy²—all of which use images differently. Thus, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell appropriately visualizes an image as a family tree that branches out into a range of categories including graphic (from art history), optic (from physics), perceptual (from multiple disciplines), mental (from psychology and epistemology), and verbal (from literary criticism).³ In Mitchell’s family tree, each category branches out into a set of sub-categories that form a cohesive visual unit. His family tree visualization shows a kind of kinship between different image types that helps to facilitate understanding of what constitutes an image across disciplines. It also begins an important dialogue on the role of images as an evolving perceptual, cultural, technical and historical phenomenon within society. In Chapter 2, I leapfrog from two of Mitchell’s categories—optic and mental—into a broader re-categorization of images that reflects the influence of technology and globalization. My aim is to redefine image to be more inclusive of the rainbow of images in use today and explain how an image communicates meaning through a system that depends on stakeholders, familial characterization, cultural aesthetics, and context. In other words, an image exists as an ecosystem (see Figure 1) comprising:

      Figure 1: Image ecosystem depiction that shows resilience and ability to evolve represented by the stoic stance of a slab- serif letterform.

      How an image ecosystem communicates meaning has been the subject of scholarly debate for many decades. Faigley et al.,⁴ for instance, believe that the act of communicating with images is similar to the rhetorical act of communicating with text. They essentially argue that an image is text. However, the opposite is more accurate: text is image. That is, text is a written or typeset group of words that comprise letters that are visual symbols with phonetic sounds associated with them. As Saussure describes it, the written word is a graphic representation of language⁵—an image. And, while we cannot reduce all images to text, many of the theories we use to analyse how text conveys meaning can also be used to analyse images. For instance, as the rhetorician moves (movere), instructs (docere), and delights (delectare),⁶ the communication designer also uses images to inform, entertain, or persuade the user to adopt or change a belief or behaviour. Consider the image in Figure 2 that aims to evoke a change in behaviour by showing the negative ramifications of smoking through the package design.

      Figure 2: Show the Truth, World No Tobacco Day Campaign

      If we look specifically at twentieth-century, literary criticism we find a rich reservoir of interrelated and evolving perspectives on how images communicate meaning. Consider the image of a simple red circle. From a Saussurean perspective, this image is a sign comprising a signifier (its form as a red circle) and a signified (a concept or idea it represents) where the relationship between the signifier and the signified is an arbitrary one.⁷ The arbitrariness of the relationship between the signifier and the signified is most likely influenced by the culture of the user and communication context. As the late design historian Philip B. Meggs notes:

      The interpretation of a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1