OUGD501 Communication theory
The Shannon- Weaver Mathematical Model 1949
Employed by the american army, worked for Bell Telephone Labs, they wanted to refine there communication systems to make them more sufficient. To work out when communication broke down how specific it was and where. Shannon Weaver did research into army communications, radio and telephone was her main focus. Initially is limited to that. It has been taken as a model for communication in a social and wider sense, visual it is applicable.
If you are going to understand any communicative act its important to understand the stages saying A is trying to communicate with B isn't that easy. 5 stages to communication at each of these stages communication could break down.
Info source which sends source to transmitter it travels to a channel by signal, signal is revived by a receiver(decoder) then in a message to the destination. The information source is speaking which goes to the message through an electric signal.
With partners can you try describe the process of making a piece of graphic design.
-Information Source - > Client and Brief
-Transmitter (encoder) - > Designer
-Channel - > Piece of work created
Receiver (Decoder) - >Audience receive message
Destination - > Audience understanding the message
Understanding what could go wrong in the process to make communication efficient
Discuss what could go wrong that would affect communication being smooth, or to stop the message that starts finishing correctly.
Information Source - > Client might not keep communicating what they want or what they had envisaged clearly. Might even keep changing their mind making it harder to understand what they want.
Transmitter - > Designer mis-interprets what the client wants/ asking for
Channel - > Piece of work. Design may not reflect what the client wanted. Might not be appropriate to the brief.
Receiver - > The design might not be applicable to the right audience that it was intended for, so the message would be interpreted wrong
Destination - > Wouldn't be a clear message, or if there even is a message. Design is rendered useless.
All sorts of design in the world, if we say good design is about communication it needs to be targeted to the audience and there destination. To understand how they understand it.
A lot of people like to focus on the design at the beginning stages but more importantly it is about the destination and the message, you almost have to go backwards start from the destination and work backwards towards the information source.
Noise can happen at any stage of the process, example noise interns of the channel is noise on the line because of electrical fault then you can't hear everything that has been said.
In terms of design the noise at the information stage would be the readability, wrote in bad handwriting, personal life of the designer getting in the way. Too much information given to the designer. If the designer has to speak to people higher up in a professional sense and the client keeps changing there mind.
Transmitter - > Technical faults. functions didn't work, mac broke etc.
Channel - > Is the thing that carries the message example billboard so for example if, wherever you wanted the piece of Graphic design to go fails or changes in any way then it will affect what you have done. Billboard that has lots of things around it then it may drown the design out so it gets ignored.
Receiver - > May not have a specific audience, the company you could be designing for has had bad press so it may have lost the majority of its audience. Actual noise, other billboards, lessen the expense to which the receiver sees the design.
Destination - > Audience de testing the advert for example advertising shoes and people or the audience are slating the product in which you have designed for. Other pieces of graphic design adverting something very similar so you have rivals. Other messages coming from different things.
Level A- Technical Problems
How accurately can the message be transmitted?
Level B- Semantic problems
How precisely is the message conveyed?
Level C- Effectiveness problems
How effectively does the received meaning affect behaviour?
Majority of Shannon Weavers research was done at Level A
Take any of the problems discussed and try and fit them into the categories above and what you can do to rectify them.
Clarity of what the client wants would be Level A and B
Technical issues at Level A- Print issues, how the print looked, an error in the print. to rectify the situation, planning properly incase something went wrong. Designing with the understanding that the flaws can be incurred. Safe guarding measure
Production issues would be Level B Typo's, Readability, Legibility to rectify this you would should ask for opinions develop ideas, check that every thing is correct, create mock ups.
Destination problems Level C If for example the area in which your design was supposed to go has a lot of distractions around it the message wouldn't be perceived correctly could get ignored. To rectify the situation think about the design make it more out standing to overpower the things that are around it. Check where the design is going to go, to making it appropriate for the audience in that destination. For example creating a design in french when your in the middle of London. The message would then be illegible as it wouldn't be understood.
Flaws within the Shannon Weavers mathematical model is that it is too Linear. The communication process is not just like that to more accurately define a process within graphic design you would need something that would could back to rectify the issue for feedback etc. If you do something wrong at some point you would need to go back and break down what the issue is.
Noise
Anything unintended added to the signal between transmission and reception.
With Zines the noise becomes a feature to the design of them. Aesthetic of the design. Desirable outcome, the designer wants to be the noise inserted into an already system.
To operate as the noise you need to understand the mathematical noise.
desirable and interesting.
Redundancy vs Entropy
apart from noise and understanding noise this is the key point
two concepts that are important with the mathematical model. Words are largely taking from the fields of electronics. Putting them in a social situation Redundancy is basically the path of least resistance. If you have a telephone line that communicates something 100 percent accurately that line is redundant as it doesn't interfere with the communication. As an act of visual communication is totally predictable, for communication to function accurately a redundant piece of communication has to b socially obvious and has a low amount of information to carried. reduce all possibility to have anything go wrong. Phatic Communication- Jakobson for example putting out your hand to someone in the street to shake there hand, everyone would understand that. predictable gesture because of that contains low information. If on shaking my hand and you got an electric shock then the it would become entropic, it has created a radical amount of information.
Entropy is moments of bleeding out of the channel or line, if you have a gas pipe thats loosing gas you would have entropy. Adding entropy the message is then lost. the audience centred visual communicator by ethos aims for redundancy. A fine artist or niche graphic designer aims for Entropy as they are less interested in communication. the more you think about redundancy language although complex the way it is socially used is almost redundant. Words are redundant you don't need to use language to be productive and still understood.
As designers we are more concerned about building systems of redundancy into our designs as we are more concerned about our audience, we need to understand the Shannon Weaver model.
Questions Task 1...
Apply Shannon and Weavers model to an example of communication. How widely is this applicable? How useful do you find this sort of exercise?
What are the main communicative functions of redundancy? What do we mean by saying the English language is 50% redundant?
The ways to apply this to the world and not just the design process, example from the mirror in 1981.
Image on the back - The message is strange and hard to understand. The editor has added in to redundancy to communicate rioting black people. framed with confrontation. the text would have to back up the image. You think the image is one thing however the text gives you a whole different feel. The editor is trying to tap into the audience view in a context that would understand that wouldn't shock there world view. However the editor is racist.
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