Are Designers Authors?

You might know that Picasso painted Guernica or that The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But unless you're willing to dig (and even then) you probably wouldn't know which designer or team of designers made the advertisement on the billboard you pass by every day or who wrote the Help page for your favorite app.

Paintings, books, songs—these types of works, along with many others, are understood to have and produce authors. But there's a lot of work out there that was made by someone who is not considered its author. And sometimes the attributed author is an entitity, like a company or an institution.

Authors create what we perceive as an original message; they're given authority over a product, even when the individuals who have been as involved in the process of crafting that product aren't. In that way, designated authors take on a lot of responsibility because they are directly accountable for what they create.

But why should this matter for designers?

It has been traditionally thought that technical communicators, including visual communicators like designers, should be invisible in the process of production. But the effort to make these individuals invisible not only denies them power over the messages they contribute to, but also encourages the belief that their work can be “ethically transparent” (Slack et al., p. 32).

To produce something is to be involved in its articulation. Even when we communicate "just data", which we like to think of as unbiased and True, we know that the way in which we choose to communicate that data and which parts we choose to omit (or obscure!) contributes to its meaning and can have a significant impact on how it be interpreted and understood by an audience. As such, Slack et al. offer that

“...because professional communicators contribute to the process of articulating meaning, whether they choose to or not, they must be able to analyze critically the ethical implications of the meanings they contribute to.”

This is not to say that we are doomed to never communicating well because of our intent, values, and biases—far from it! It is to say that an essential part of communicating well is understanding how our involvement in creating a work contributes to its meaning and interpretation. This approach empowers us to be better aware of how the choices we make can help or hinder our goals on a project, whether that be a document explaining important safety measures, an app workflow helping people file insurance claims, or a presentation persuading high-ranking execs to go with your idea.

Even when I'm not perceived as an author, I should be mindful not to fall into the trap of considering myself or my colleagues machines that can achieve complete detachment from the work we produce, but as professionals that should strive to be aware of the significance of our involvement in its articulation.

Learning to be Visually Fluent in a Visually Dense World

When I was learning to draw as a kid, I was fascinated by how artists could take what they saw in the world and in their minds and then produce it on a flat surface.

I wanted to draw what I saw, but to do this I first needed to think of the things I saw as drawable elements, seperate from my perception of them. This is difficult because we don’t generally see things in parts, but as what they mean to us. I didn’t think of all the shapes, shadows, highlights, and contours that made up what I was seeing; I saw something that was familiar and symbolic.

Before I started studying and thinking about rhetoric in design, I didn't really think too much about how my visual envirnoment was composed of separate working parts creating messages either.

With practive I learned to more closely consider how the things I saw were influencing my thoughts, feelings, and interactions with the world—even how the way physical spaces are designed influence how I behave in them (anyone who's ever had a party and found that people always gather in the kitchen knows how this works).

Becoming more aware of the many ways in which the messages in the world affected me was a huge part of what inspired me to design. Visual thinking is an active problem-solving process. When we design, especially when the purpose is to communicate information and encourage an action, those in the audience become users of visual information.

By working to understand how our environments influence perceptions, and think about how and what we are communicating through visual documents, we become more capable designers and visual communicators.

Human-Centered Data Design

In “Visual Culture and Ethics”, Kimball and Hawkins talk about how as document designers, we will very often “encounter situations in which [we] must decide how to balance the agendas of [our] clients with needs of the users” (p. 61). This is an important conversation in technical communication because it forces us to ask questions regarding for whom we do what we do in each special context. I've also thought about what it means to be a human (not a robot) designing technical communication (Slack et al.’s argument that technical communicators should be able to critically analyze the ethics of the meaning they contribute to comes to mind). However, “Cruel Pies” prodded me to make self-evaluations about how I have perceived human-less visuals in my education and life, and how these experiences have come to affect the way I approach information design.

I began to think about how I have framed information in the past to fit a purpose under the impression that the user would be aware of the entire context (e.g. omitting human factors when reciting statistics in papers or infographics), unaware that I was creating an environment where spitting out data efficiently became more necessary than the concept it was trying to represent. In the same way, I thought of all the information I have learned in my career and as a student student from graphic representations, all the while subconsciously forgetting the imperfect human behind the designs. This new awareness can be very empowering both to my role as a designer and consumer of information. This is important because visuals placed in an environment of ethos often are perceived to stand by themselves as facts, rather than representations of fact (e.g., how dinosaurs are visually represented becomes the way they existed).

Although technical communication has stressed accuracy and effectiveness in the past, this awareness makes us capable of giving equal importance to the humanities in visual communication. “Cruel Pies” challenges some of the traditional ways we think of designing “effective” or “accurate information”; Dragga and Voss write this of their revised visuals: “True, the pictographs are statistically redundant...but they are not emotionally redundant. In fact, they add the vital element that was missing—the human beings who constitute the fatality figures” (p. 271).

Yes, it would be impractical and infective to remind users each time that they must consider situations as whole; we already knpw that good and ethical communication is difficult. What Dragga and Voss stress, and what I took away, is that we have to consciously keep humanistic ethics from being regarded as having lesser importance than accuracy and effectiveness. At work, it can be easy to become overwhelmed by expectations, deadline, and many other factrs; even still, I want to remain concious of what I've learned and keep striving to be the best designer and visual communicator I can be.

The Rhetoric of Scientific Visuals

Anne R. Richards "Argument and Authority" complicates the task of representing reality through visuals, explaining how certain texts have authority that readers internalize, making it difficult for the readers--experts and non-experts--to be constantly discerning of the rhetoric of argument, the potential precedence of ethos over logos in the texts, and the representational nature of the images (e.g., the T-Rex becomes its illustration).

"Visual representations appearing in contemporary scientific journals…are usually based on inscriptions produced by apparatuses serving and immured in the culture of science, yet it is the rare viewer of these representations who reminds himself that what he sees “are not ‘natural objects’ independent of cultural processes and literary forms”. (p. 185)

Before we even begin to think about the rhetoric employed in scientific texts and its implications for technical communicators, we need to know that it exists. One of the main reasons that representation is an issue, despite our culturally ingrained recoil at thinking that scientific data has rhetoric, is that these “cultural components embedded in visual representations” (p. 203) are not made transparent to readers.

Fortunately, this article offers a myriad of examples of rhetoric at work in scientific texts, the most memorable (for me) being the employment of “nature faking” (p. 196) where photographs will not suffice to make the point. Another example is illustrated by Richards’s assertion that “by creating tables on separate sheets… the author would have contributed to her own ethos in much the same way as she would have done by…citing a colleague whose claims supported her own” (p. 198). Opting for having tables on separate sheets rather than integrated into the text adds to credibility because it signals to the reader that the author is not afraid to display raw data. However, because “dumped” or summarized data can alienate the reader (p. 190), this ethos-adding practice is best coupled with tendential data, in which the author interprets data for us to support the argument. That is, rhetorical use in the discipline is practiced and complex.

That being said, nature faking or using tendential data are not always malpractices, as they are often done so that reader better understands the argument and research of the author. It is thus important to note that none of what I’m saying should imply that I think all scientists are manipulative and devious folk (because rhetoricians aren’t either), but rather should reinforce Richards’s claim that the “obscuring” (pg. 204) of the fact that rhetoric is fully present in science is misleading and in some cases dangerous.

So how can we do our part to make cultural components transparent, short of having disclaimers at every point (or having them read this article)? We know that we have to work to dismantle the assumption that presentations of data and arguments are rhetoric-less, and then assure readers that this doesn’t mean scientists are no longer credible (such is the consequence of the negative connotations of rhetoric). This might encourage readers to “exercise logic freely” (p. 203).

Designing for Areas not Associated with Benefitting from Design

Zimmerman and Schultz’s “A Study of the Effectiveness of Information Design Principles Applies to Clinical Research Questionnaires” ultimately encouraged me to think about the compromises and difficulties involved in applying theory that I learned in my studies in my everyday work. As the authors mention, they often “had to compromise among the needs of the users, the general design guidelines, and the constraints of the software” (p. 183). It is useful, then, to be aware that our clients might find some of our choices to be futile, misguided, pedantic or, worse yet, irrelevant.

This awareness increases the likelihood that we will try to be more involved in explaining to our client how using information design principles (and not just our each individual preferences) will help their end goal, instead of being insulted or frustrated at their misunderstanding. After all, as technical communicators we are “cursed” with technical communicator knowledge, which renders it more difficult for us to see how others could not understand the importance of good technical communication in a given field. That being said, the threat of a negative client response is increased when information designers have to work in fields that are not traditionally associated with benefitting from design principles. In the case of the article, the field is clinical research with regard to the questionnaires they use to build their databases. From broad personal experience as a reader, I know that medical questionnaires and forms tend to be very unusable and difficult to fill out presently. Although many readers accept this as a norm of their struggle with documentation, technical communicators must ask why they are not designed better.

This is a question that the authors use previous research to answer; they state that “there is a gap between research and practice in document design… much of the research is conducted in widely disparate fields” (p. 178). That is, because documents are used in a large array of fields, many of the people who create forms and questionnaires have no training or experience in document or information design. However, the concern is not just for reader usability nor is it just a design or editing issue. As Zimmerman and Schultz point out:

“the success of the design used in this study should be considered in terms of its potential to add to patients’ overall personal healthcare and raises an ethical question about the practice of making broad generalizations regarding healthcare based on incomplete data” (p. 192).

For some of us, the design work that we do might rarely or never present us with ethical questions of this magnitude, but it is an important consideration nonetheless. Others do not have the same skills or knowledge that we do, just as we likely do not have theirs. As such, we must learn to be active and empathetic in explaining how the use of information design can benefit clients.