Visual Rhetoric And The Eloquence Of Design

The essays in VISUAL RHETORIC AND THE ELOQUENCE OF DESIGN foreground the rhetorical functions of design artifacts. Rhetoric, normally understood as verbal or visual messages that have a tactical persuasive objective—a speech that wants to convince us to vote for someone, or an ad that tries to persuade us to buy a particular product—becomes in Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design the persuasive use of a broad set of meta-beliefs. Designed objects are particularly effective at this second level of persuasion because they offer audiences communicative data that reflect, and also orchestrate, a potentially broad array of cultural concerns. Persuasion entails both the aesthetic form and material composition of any object.

This book analyzes the role that human forms play in visualizing practical information and in making that information understandable, accessible, inviting, and meaningful to readers—in short, "humanizing" it. Although human figures have long been deployed in practical communication, their uses in this context have received little systematic analysis. Drawing on rhetorical theory, art history, design studies, and historical and contemporary examples, the book explores the many rhetorical purposes that human forms play in functional pictures, including empowering readers, narrating processes, invoking social and cultural identities, fostering pathos appeals, and visualizing data. The book is aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in business, technical, and professional communication as well as an interdisciplinary audience in rhetoric, art and design, journalism, engineering, marketing, science, and history.

Design and Science addresses the inter-relationship, in both historical and contemporary contexts, between design thinking and design processes and scientific and medical research methods. Contributors address the parallels between research methodologies in design and the sciences, both of which involve the recognition of an issue, conceptualisation of ways to resolve it, and then the modelling and implementation of a viable solution. Much research across various scientific disciplines follows a similar pattern. Thematic sections explore visualisation, visual narrative and visual metaphor; biodesign and biomimicry; makers and users in design and science, and data visualisation, discussing the role of data from nature as an ultimate source of design.

The author delivers an account of how to use the images to deliver the intended meaning.

The Politics of the Superficial argues that the increasing volume of visually communicative surfaces in public life contributes to a very particular form of public imagination and political activity.

This book presents a number of experimental projects in communication design as a symbolic and public practice. It proceeds from a critical position vis-à-vis the customary mediation of information--a position more necessary than ever, now that design operates so prominently in the entertaining and marketing spectacle organized by the neo-liberal world order as an instrument for the colonization of human existence. Unlike the classic form of visual communication, the dialogic approach is a connective model of visual rhetoric with a polemic nature and polyphonic visual form--a storytelling structure that seeks to reveal the opposing elements of the message and opts for active interpretation by the spectator.

Humansâ (TM) first attempts to record their thoughts resulted in images painted in the decorated caves throughout Europe, known as Upper Paleolithic Art. As humans developed written alphabets to record their thoughts in words, the images they painted and the words they wrote competed for attention. As the â oeSister Artsâ tradition attests, words and pictures have developed along distinct, though related, lines. With the rise of New Media, however, the innovative inter-animation of words and pictures in the screen space of the computer deserves â " and requires â " artists and designers and rhetoricians to take a fresh look at the complexities of human communication, particularly the way in which words and pictures share commonalities. The range of image-texts, from cave to computer, from palimpsests to pixels, demands critical attention from modern designers who create innovative image-texts for New Media. Eloquent Design: Essays on the Rhetorics of Vision explores ancient image-making as a basis for understanding the modern uses of image-texts in New Media. Eloquent Design also considers the current state of imaginative design from the Sister Arts tradition to Gestalt theories of vision to social semiotics of image-texts. Moreover, Eloquent Design proposes a generative method for creating image-texts, a technique called â oeRhetorical Vision.â Applications of the generative mode of Rhetorical Vision give rise to the innovative designs of palimpsests and experimental modes of writing, such as creative nonfiction. Essays in Eloquent Design outline a method for teaching Rhetorical Vision as the inter-animation of words and pictures.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent.