Creativity and Design
Creativity and Design
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But how the idea comes is at least for the time being
a certain mystery
Gyorgy Kepes
On Design, in: The creative mind,
1964, Russel & Russel (p. 50)
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Iko A. Avital, Ph.D.
I am reviewing the research field in the areas of intelligence and creativity in a concise and chronological mode in order to comprehend the nuances that are interlinked with time, social perceptions and philosophies. Through the studying of this field I understand the difficulty in the quantification and measuring of the creativity concept which is the creation of the human spirit. Apparently it is possible to notice the primary creativity’s product- the talent- through the potential identification of visible capabilities; or one can notice, in retrospect, the result of the creativity- discovery, creation, action (Watt, Picasso, Gandhi). The spiritual world of the creator is not visible and is not given to examination using scientific tools but only to studying through observation and scrutinizing. That is why it was important for me to present ideas, approaches and ideas of researchers from various areas on the issue of creativity.
Creativity exists in the foundation of our life, in science, arts and all areas of life. It encompasses all human beings, children, adults and old people- male and female. Creativity is engraved in the technological product, in design work just as in the playing of the infant who imagines a castle while playing with sand on the beach. Creativity is not absolute but individual and it differs and varies in each and every person. It is not the product of other previous steps, walking on a known and safe road but its nature is in walking on unfamiliar paths which were not paved by others. Creativity enables forming contacts between segments of information, materials and experience that exist in each one individually or ones that in the past were linked with various roads or patterns. Forming new links or connections stems from a new and fresh approach towards familiar situations whose product is the idea, the experience, the experiment- a product or a model that is new or an improved one. Creativity is the fountain from which the designer derives his ideas and it represents his authenticity, exclusively.
The enquiry of creativity grew out of the research of intelligence in which IQ is measured, the ability to accumulate and remember information. The intelligence tests for example examine focused thinking so that each problem has one solution only while creativity is assisted by branched thinking: many solutions are possible for the problem, which are formed due to the flow, flexibility and originality of the creative thinking. Intelligence is characterized by logic, narrow categorization of ideas, focused thinking, interpersonal thinking and objective wording. Creativity on the other had is characterized by imagination, free and flexible flow of ideas, branched thinking, intra-personal communication and subjective reaction. There is also the approach that identified connection between intelligence and creativity. That approach is accepted as the capability for original and creative thinking stipulated by a collection of several traits that forms creative linkage to that ability to roam freely between one connection to another; others credit it to the special ability to connect between associations.
Francis Galton (1869) argued that “…the natural capabilities of the human being derive from heredity, precisely according to the terms such as the form and physical traits of the organic world in general”.
Caesar Lombroso (1895, In: Noy, 1999), a psychiatrist who argued that one has to search for the irregular factors in the ability in mental disorder and madness; he even presented a long list of creators from all areas according to their kind of mental disorder.
Poincare (1924) described a time of basic research of the problem in the creator following which, supposedly, there is rest. He argued that the result appears suddenly and unexpectedly which requires polishing of the conscious, development and verification.
Arthur Koestler (1949) who was among the pioneers in the area of creation, included in his definition also the paradox linked with the creation’s process and he explained the creative activity as follows:
“Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual” (p. 348)
Koestler argued that creativity stems through the break that is revealed in the thinking compartments; a creative idea does not arrive from organized thinking but through breaching it while an idea that is usually identified with one section of the brain is implemented by another section and thus carries a surprise with it. The development of creative flexibility would lead to humorist approach. The joke which is the lower form of creativity, uses that fact and we do laugh versus the incompatibility within it. Koestler (1964) says that humor points at man’s ability to laugh at himself and see himself from a different angle. Humor is the result of external stimulation and the reaction towards that stimulation, by the inner world. This is a creative communicative, intra-personal and interpersonal process.
Guilford (1956) showed that intelligence is not a uniform trait but one that is composed of approximately 120 different mental factors found in each person at different compounds and dosages. It is his opinion that there is linkage between the interpreted thinking and the creative process; many researchers used this basis for tests aiming to identify thinking which is interpreted as the criterion for the evaluation of the examinee’s potential creativity measure.
Carl Rogers (1961) regarded creativity as the property of the true human being. He explained that the creation process has identical importance in all the various layers of the human’s experiences:
“The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for a meat; a young author writing his first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition, creativity and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less” (p. 355)
Rogers added that creativity is a trait that stems from the quality of man’s connection with nature and the creation. He argued that when the human being is free and is able to experience and implement the innate nature, he acts in a creative mode. Rogers regarded the “creative action” as natural behavior of man’s organism.
McKinnon (1962) examined 124 architects from the USA and claimed that “…apparently there is a need for a certain measure of intelligence for creativity but beyond that point, being more intelligent or less, does not determine the creativity level of the architect (p. 18).
Layman Bryson (1964) researches the mysteries of creativity. He claimed that men and women with high creative abilities are almost unable to tell us how they acquired their abilities. Mostly they are also unable to locate their fountain of inspiration; even if someone can look into the depth of his creative world, he is unable to express it verbally. If it were possible to do so fully, why do they need to communicate through their art?
Cautiously one can describe a number of principles of the collective insights of these artists, scientists and philosophers. There is consent among these people that a number of conditions do help the creative work just as others present an obstacle. There are things for which the talented people do everything and there are things that discourage them. In principle, Bryson assumes that freedom is the most necessary stipulation for the development of the creative mind. It is the freedom that the person himself shall define as freedom: it would be more accurate to say that the creative artists or the scientists must feel free but at the same time have discipline which is not mixed with freedom. The artist does not work through discipline determined for him by another. Bryson argues that there is some kind of heroic self-control that all artists have, even those who seem most bohemian and most unaware of the conventions of society around them. That self-control is the one that grants them the opportunity to express t heir inspiration in a form that communicates.
“One general rule about which all share consensus is that anything that is truly creative, must come out from the experience of the artists, his personal experience and not from something he achieves ’second hand’. That is what turns it into something valid. This is the artistic decency” (in Kepes ,1964, p. 35).
Both of them, the scientist and the artist, use their imagination as raw material for their experiences, for what they saw, what they felt or deduced or understood. And the consequence is valid communication which is suitable for our experience and grants us values that they are able to offer to us. In other words, the creative imagination is both responsible and free.
Abraham Maslow (1971) connected the ability of the human being to be present and complete in the world with his ability to create and he saw these two phenomena- the health and creation as identical ones. He said:
“My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and concept of healthy, self-actualizing fully human person seem to becoming closer together and may perhaps turn to be the same thing” (Ibid., p. 55)
“Creating tends to be an act of a whole man; he is then integrated, unified, all of piece, one-pointed, totally organized in to the service of fascinating matter-in-hand. Creativeness is therefore systematic: i.e. a whole or gestalt quality of the whole person; it is not added to organism like a coat of paint, or like an invention of bacteria. It is the opposite of dissociation. Here-now- allness is less dissociated and more One” (Ibid., p. 58)
Maslow also clarified that even though the early philosophers lived in different cultures and different times, still they described elements in the creative process which are identical in their description to those of current researchers. He specified the elements as follows:
“A loss of self or of ego, or sometimes a transcendence of self. There is a fusion with the reality being observed….a oneness where there was twoness, an integration of some sort of the self with the non-self….and finally, almost always, the whole experienced as bliss, ecstasy, rapture, exaltation” (Ibid., p. 58)
Maslow explained the essential need for sharp perception. He argues that the regular person observes reality in a stereotypic mode, while the creative man looks at things and searches for the unique in them. The regular kind of scientists, label and explain everything in the world. The artist searches for the unique; he sees things through the fresh sight of the child. Each psychologist knows that a man can live according to a system of ideas prepared in advance, all of which were acquired during the first decade of his life and which will never change; Such a person may have a very high IQ and so, he may spend his time through intellectual activity, choose lists of evidence that support his ready ideas but this is not creativity nor is it creative thinking. His problem is that of being blind towards the real world, opaqueness towards the proofs of new evidence, distortion in perception and remembering and above all- a brain that stopped developing. In addition: creative thinking is connected with the perceptive process and not the process of memory. The major part of creative thinking is found in the clear and sharp perception, as much as possible, of the inner nature of the problem. The problem is examined by its own right, its own style as if there is no other problem. The major effort should be in search of its inner character. Contrary to that, in associative thinking, the emphasis in the seeing is on the manner in which the problem is similar to other problems that were already experienced before. Out of these two methods, the first one or the holistic-dynamic one – if this name has any meaning- conceals within it creativity, uniqueness and inventiveness. Thinking is the method according to which humanity creates something new; meaning, it must be revolutionary in the sense that it is contrary to that which is already known. If one were to exaggerate, then it may be defined as the ability to break our habits and be rid of our previous experience. Creative thinking requires courage, daring and determination. The common education does not exert itself at all to lead the individual towards examination of reality in a direct or innovative mode but it provides him with a pair of glasses prepared in advance through which he can see the world in a manner that was agreed upon; what to love, what to confirm and what to feel guilty about.
Alfred Korzybski (1974) relate to the creative scientific discovery as to a proof in the use of emotions and intuition:
“Through their self-observations the creative scientists know very well that each creative work begins as a ‘feeling’, ‘inclination’ ’suspicion’ ‘hunch’ or any other emotional state which cannot be expressed in words and which only at a later date, following a certain period of hatching , it is given a form of verbal expression that is later on processed inside a logical, clear and linguistic scheme called theorem. In mathematics we have a number of amazing examples for theorem which were developed intuitively and later on, were proved as true despite the fact that the original proof was incorrect ” (p. 43)
Robert Sternberg (1990) argues that people are creative thanks to the combination of intellectual traits (intellectual reference to their inner world and its experiencing and to his external world), thinking style (function, form, level, circumference and reliance) and the personality (tolerance for lack of clarity, readiness to overcome obstacles, willingness for growth, inner motivation, readiness to undertake risks, aspiration to gain cognition and esteem and the readiness to work in order to gain esteem).
Erika Landau (1990) an Israeli researcher in the area of creativity and giftedness among children. Argues that creative people are open, sensitive, curious and like to play. They are looking at things through “naïve eyes” (an expression used by Einstein to describe the experience of seeing the usual and the banal through primary and fresh sight). They approach their environment without prejudices, they are daring and adventuress; their thinking patterns excel with a flow of ideas that is greater than the usual’ have greater flexibility and are able to see problems from different aspects. They have greater imagination, are more refined and original in the solving of problems and prefer intricacy. They are more narcissistic, more dominant and aware of themselves. In order to be create the creative human being needs stimuli and encouragement. Landau defines creative thinking thus: the word “to think” serves for a totality of situations. We “think” when an internal stimulus operates our imagination and we wander through simulated situations as in a dream. We “think” that when external stimulus causes us to imagine to ourselves desired situations as when during day-dreaming we “think” or wish to recall, plan or express a certain belief; we “think” when we estimate, weigh or define a problem and also when we find and formulate solutions by relying on existing information. All of these are included in creative thinking. Creative affection is a bipolar activity between logic and imagination, the product of intra-personal and interpersonal communication. Picasso claimed: “I used to pain like Rafael and it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to pain like a child“.
Howard Gardner (1983) from Harvard University suggested radical phrasing for the concept “intelligence”. Each one has his unique and specific “intelligence profile”. Gardner presents the collection of intelligences , each one of which is linked to separate abilities and each one is able to perform a unique system of roles: linguistic intelligence (which is expressed through the work of the poet, journalist, copywriter and lawyer); musical intelligence (expressed through the work of the composer, conductor, music player and the acoustics expert) ; logical-mathematical intelligence (expressed through the work of the mathematician and the computer scientist); spacial intelligence (expressed through the work of the architect, surgeon, geographer and navigator); kinesthetic-physical intelligence (expressed through the work of the dancer, mountain climber, athlete, juggler); interpersonal intelligence (expressed through the work of the therapist, teacher, devoted parent; intra-personal intelligence (expressed among people with the ability for sharp intra-profound observation); natural intelligence (expressed through the work of the biologist, ecologist, taxonomic dealing with the classification of organisms); existential intelligence (concerns cosmological issues and sublime questions about life and death) (Wollman, 2001). Gardner argues that the imperative condition for artistic achievements at maturity is innate. The environment is an important factor for the hereditary one; the artist must nurture within himself intense aspiration; and finally there is experience, skill and dedication throughout the whole life.
Daniel Goleman (1995) suggests the emotional intelligence as architecture of the mind which exists at the basis of the emotion and the wisdom: the ability to control emotional impulses, read the inner and profound sensations of the other and handle relationships. Goleman positions the emotions at the center of man’s important abilities such as: anger (rage, fury, ferocity, resentment, provocation and animosity), sadness (sorrow, agony, gloominess, somberness, loneliness, self pity and despair), fear (anxiety, apprehension, nervousness, concern, alarm, suspicion, doubt and uncertainty), pleasure (happiness, gladness, welfare, satisfaction, contentment, ecstasy, fun, excitement, enthusiasm and thrill), love (friendship, trust, devotion, admiration and intoxication ), surprise (shock, amazement, wonder and puzzlement), disgust (contempt, nausea, reservation, mockery, rejection and regression), shame (guilt, embarrassment, regret, disappointment, humiliation and guilty conscious). Goleman argues that “the logic of the emotional consciousness is associative. It relates to the foundations that symbolize reality or instigate a memory of reality as if these were identical to that reality: imageries, metaphors and illusions that refer directly to the emotional consciousness as indeed the arts do- novels, movies, poetry, singing, theatre and the opera” (Goleman, p. 318).
Goleman quotes Joseph Lado, a scientist who is researching the nervous system and who deals with the “emotional” mind and focuses on the “amigdala”- a structure the form of an almond and is located at the back part of the brain. He considers it to be the center of emotions which creates the primary “instinctive” reaction to external stimuli: run away or fight, be very excited or stay calm. Following a period of observation, that person would have to learn the true nature and meaning of his emotional reaction and act on the basis of his understanding in an appropriate mode.
Danah Zohar , a lecturer at Oxford and Ian Marshall, a therapist suggest (2001) the model of spiritual intelligence as the process that bridges between the two theories, the intellectual and the emotional. They are quoting the neurologist V.S. Ramachandran and his team (1997) from the University of California about the existence of “God’s point” in the human’s brain. That spiritual center is located between the nervous connections in the side lobes of the brain. They also quote the Austrian neurologist Wolf Singer about the nervous process in the brain which is in charge of the unity and the provision of meaning to the experiencing and the unifying thinking. They quote the neurologist and anthropologist Terence Deacon from Harvard who argues that through his frontal lobe man has the ability to deal with meaning. He claims that language is a unique phenomenon of man which is basically symbolic and it is the activity of the center of meaning which developed in parallel to the swift development in the frontal lobes of the brain. Zohar and Marshall (2001, p. 23) claim that “in order to be creative, we rely on it while we should be flexible, have a vision or spontaneous in a creative mode“. They indicate eight characteristics of the spiritual intelligence: the ability to be flexible, adjust through spontaneous and flexible mode, high level of self-awareness, the ability to withstand suffering and use it; the ability to withstand pain and excel above it; the merit to receive inspiration from vision and values; recoil from causing unnecessary damage, the inclination to see connections between various things, be holistic; emphasized inclination to ask questions on the basis of “why?” or “what if?” and to search for answers “from the basis”; the ability to act against conventions.
Ted Faulkner (2000) argued that in regular thinking, the thinker and the object he thinks about, remain separated. As opposed to that, in creative thinking the two become one. This occurs through the visualization and the emotions so that the thinking seems as though it encompasses the objects and becomes part of it. Through this seeing, the brain performs visualization and feels the object without verbal thinking and a new aspect of the object comes to our mind following long and concentrated thinking. Faulkner says “the solutions found me” (p. 46). Our words would never encompass the object. When a non-Aristotelian thinker sees an object , he remains quiet and uses intuition and visualization and not words. This is a creative stage ; he uses a most meticulous perception and later on, uses the intuition in order to notice the subtleties of the object or the event; finally he feels the thinnest levels and then translates emotions into words. Faulkner (2000) says:
“I believe that creativity is the best means for obtaining cognition and poetry must of course be one of the universal expressions for creativity. The principle of poetry writing is similar to anything that is connected with creativity; the poet sees an event or an object on the profound level through the use of his creative intelligence and when he looks with concentration, he reaches that same feeling of exaltation. He translates his emotions into visual pictures and finally, turns them into words. The reader of the poetry must translate the words into the original feelings of the poet or else he might miss the meaning of the whole poem. Quite often, the imageries in poetry stem from day dreaming which are precisely identical to the creativity of the scientists and inventors. Many ideas evolve during the sleep, especially during the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep” (p. 105).
The psychoanalytic approach to creativity assumed that creativity derives from the need to provide unconscious needs in man. That approach claims that in general, creativity is a by product of the process and the primary need that aims to satisfy the basic needs required for the survival of a person such as nutrition, procreation, cover for the body, roof and mobility from one place to another (Arieti, 1976).
Zigmund Freud (1908) saw ample resemblance between the neurosis phenomena and creativity. He felt that the two phenomena are drawn from “boiling conflicts” which are the result of desires and biological needs which did not reach their satisfaction. Freud explained that the motives that lead man to create as the combination of traits which he named “sexual curiosity” and “investigating approach”. Other researchers saw creativity as part of the mental functioning. They claimed that the human being functions in creativity through search and aiming to find pleasure and avoid pain. That argument is based upon the opinions of Freud who sometimes argued that in order to avoid pain the human being sinks into fantasies and day-dreaming. Freud considered these as a compulsory part in the process of creation. Freud argued that only unhappy people are immersed in such experiences in order to form within them the experience of detachment from reality which leads to alleviation of the pain. Thus one may gather from these points that the creation experience is bound by the artist’s disconnection from reality.
Carl Jung (1977) added to Freud’s claim and divided creativity into two categories: the first is the category of “Psychological art” which in his opinion appears as result of the activities of the various processes and needs. Jung called the second category “Visionary art” and claimed that it drew its power from the high collective awareness. Jung’s doctrine amply influenced the world of many artists at the beginning of the 20th century; artists like Jackson Pollok, De Koenig, Andy Warhol, Ernst Fox and many others, who belonged to the “abstract expressionism” stream and the “New York School”, formed new approaches to painting which were affected by Jung’s doctrine (Naifeh & Smith, 1989). One approach which is the result of the understandings of Jung’s doctrine is called Action Painting. In this approach the artists regard the canvas as “the field of occurrence” that absorbs the creation process directly and intuitively and connects with the powers, imageries and archetypes that grant mystic-releasing qualities that form reaction in the artist and the spectator who looks as the art creation. Another approach that was developed under the influence of Jung’s doctrine is called “The color fields”. In this approach, the artists searched for a way to express that which exists beyond the visible- the transcendental. Using huge canvasses the artists created “colorful fields” without clear imageries and hoped to form contact with that part in their soul which is not under the domain of the consciousness; the part of the unconscious. Jackson Pollok testified that in this opinion, Jung has granted “anchor” to the feeling that was shared by many artists; the feeling that art draws its power from sources that are different from their own, private self and which are not given to verbal interpretations.
The psychoanalytic perception well explains the “psychological art” and the creative activity. According to that perception, the creative activity per se is not the major motive of psychological art. The major motive is the need for alleviation of pain, stress, anxiety or sexual tension. Freud himself said in his autobiographic investigation that, finally, psychoanalysis per se is unable to do anything in order to clarify the nature of “the artistic gift” and it is also unable to explain the meaning and the way through which the creative artist operates (In: Arieti, 1976).
Bergquist (1988) argued that the connection and the link between the primary needs (particularly the sexual ones) and creativity, shows that there is creative biology that could turn into a psychological process. That is to say that here is an argument claiming that once all the primary needs were satisfied, the creativity is a biological and psychological functioning.
The behaviorist approach claims that only that which can be observed or looked at is worthy of a psychological research. Creativity, thoughts and emotions are internal and one cannot observe them. That is why the behavior researchers do not investigate the complete processes of the creation but delimit their research only to the phenomena that are linked with the creation process (Bergquist, 1988).
According to researchers such as Watson and Thorndike (In: Bergquist, 1988) the behaviorist approach argues that the creative activity is given to observation and it is a cognitive and behaviorist activity that relies on materials that are stored in the unconscious. These materials emerge through synthesis into the conscious as soon s there is a problem or an activity. In addition, the cognitive and behaviorist activity is registered in the person as tension that was diagnosed only at the moment when the person found a successful solution which is expressed through the artistic product (Bergquist, 1988).
Abraham Maslow (1971) one of the forefathers of the humanistic approach explained that according to the humanistic approach, man’s researching and natural entity is expressed through creativity. His argument was that creativity is compulsory for the growth and it teaches the human being to adjust to his environment and sense the sensation of its meaning to him and to his life. Maslow believed that all of these would lead man towards proper life out of whole health. The common and the central for all researchers in the humanistic stream is the belief that the human ability for growth is found in the center of the existence of the human race. Seeing human nature as conscious, guided independently, expressed and healthy differentiates the humanistic perception from other perceptions for it presents the holistic whole to the research of man and the creation process through which he expresses himself in the world (Frick, W.B., 1987).
In his book “How do designers think” (1980) Brian Lawson wrote: “So much has been said and written about the creativity phenomenon and still it remained one of the most unclear ideas and perhaps even the most confusing ones in the literature of psychological thinking” (p. 107). Still, Lawson argues that what is clear is the fact that design is a creative occupation and good designers are ones with creative personality.
———————————————————————————————iko Avital—–———————————————
תגים: Creativity and Design, מאמרים
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נובמבר 1, 2008
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Micrography
A visual ergonomics design
method
Iko Avital, Ph.D.
Before introducing the suggested methodology, I shall briefly describe the field and related spheres of interest. Prior acquaintance with these issues can yield the methodology’s extent, vitality, context and connectivity, as it is concerned with visual ergonomics of the consumer. Standing in front of a product or its package on a store shelf, the consumer faces a pattern of symbols that are encoded and summed up in a single visual statement, called “the message.” The simple word is common and worn out, implying none of its subject’s complexity. The message’s main concern lies in the presentation of visual components, arranged in a particular formation, order and hierarchy, encoded by the designer and served up to the consumer as a single loaded unit, containing a moving cargo of information. The circles of interest - external, technological, economic, artistic, cultural and more – embody fields of energy engages in dynamic, continuous dialogs among themselves, and create a holistic structure that contains simple as well as complex fabrics.
The Visual Democracy
Artist Barbara Kruger cynically paraphrased the statement made by the philosopher Descartes “Cogito Ergo Sum” (I think therefore I am) in her piece shown at the Köln Museum, Germany (1990), titled “I shop therefore I am”. Asked if her work was an artistic protest or graphic boldness using the visual language of advertising, Kruger humbly replied, “I am one who works with words and images, and others can interpret it as they will”. This is definitely a bold statement, showing the power of consuming and how it takes over the majority of our lives. Shopping as life-style has become a well established concept related to leisure time, social encounters and subjects of interest and conversation. All of the design trades have joined together to create a shopping/entertainment ground that is convenient, pleasant and tempting. The city’s main street and its glimmering stores have been abandoned in favor of shopping malls offering an ultimate variety of shops, as well as pleasant and entertaining experiences for the eye and palate – plus the convenience of available parking.
Another factor is the brainwashing influence of commercial television.The advantages of the “shy giant” are described by McLuhan in his groundbreaking book Understanding Media. His research study comparing the comprehension by Toronto students of the contents from different media, including lectures, radio, books and television, showed that television excelled in every form and group. Television is the tribal bonfire around which our daily life course, family and personal, orbits: food, fashion, entertainment, travel, cars…and opinions.
In contrast, the computer falls far short in that area. E-commerce is still in its infancy. The consumer-product interactive dialog, premature Internet technology, methods of distribution and payment exist but are not yet maximally efficient tools for virtual buying and selling. It is obvious that solving these problems will bring women into the circle of buyers, which will in turn transform the media into an all-purpose on-line mall, revive e-commerce and develop it to a much higher degree. Yet, until that time, it seems that the advantage of arbitrary and direct consumer- product contact will continue to ensure the dominance of the off-line grounds: the grouping, variance and packaging of the products, the shelves and the products themselves that can be smelled, touched, tasted and taken away. Cairncross describes some of the effects of globalization in the electronic age in her book The Death of Distance (1997). Not only does telecommunication ignore geography, but also creates new cultures and new communities.
Economics will exceed its own limits and become more flexible, if no longer constrained by the dependency between the location of the means of production and their strategic management. It will then be possible for a factory to be placed away from its management and administration, based on economical considerations, and lead to multi-national corporations that create new products, markets and targets. When technology finally meets the changes in this new electronic democracy, the use of the virtual product, package and store will be made possible on a daily basis. Marketing strategies, too, hold continuous dialogs with the flexible data and variables of the product, costing, slicing of the target population and the sales promotion and publicity means.
Against such a dynamic, raging, and ever-changing platform of economic culture and society, we need to have a stable, methodological format capable of proposing cognitive planning means to enrich the designer’s creative abilities. The Greek philosopher Thales said, “When you jump twice into the river, it is not the same water, nor is it the same you…” The format must allow for mental and creative flexibility as one of its highest values. Neither art nor design can offer a single solution to the problem; on the other hand, a systematic frame may steer us toward a solution and produce creative stimuli that will offer innumerable alternatives. The ability to generate diverse alternatives provides the promise of stabilization as an answer to the challenges of market competition
Rebus Writing
To understand the principles of visual ergonomics relating perceptive abilities to cognitive skills, we must at first consider the visual thinking process. How can a person generate a thought or an idea out of abstract forms, rich in meanings, and bring them together into a shape that can be understood as an idea? The word “idea” originated from the ancient Greek word ideieen, to see. It relates to the spiritual ability and talent of the creator to connect with his imagination through his inner vision, his conscious and subconscious, in order to excavate items, symbols and shapes and to mold the contents. So far, no one has managed to describe this God-given gift scientifically.
The designer, as opposed to the artist, is committed to connecting his visual statement to the consumer’s rapid understanding. The early designer was only committed to a limited population with which he was familiar and that was physically proximate, in the same city and country. Today, as graphic design language becomes international due to high-tech achievements, message clarity anytime and anywhere - changes from advantage to necessity.
On the part of the consumer, well-developed visual perception is considered to be a cognitive skill that enables fast, qualitative and even manipulative communication. The better this potential is actualized, the simpler and more abstract the means of communication should be. But the main thing we must remember is that in design, over and above the commitment to communication, is the need to promise a very clear and understandable message. Dialing someone is not enough; it is just as important to verify that the message and contents of the visual dialog have been delivered and understood.
I wonder if Malevich’s supreme black square, which he called “the first step of pure creation of Art” was understood as a visual communication message (Robinson, 1995). Could non-figurative art be understood, even to specialists, without Kandinsky’s explanations provided by his 1910 series of abstract watercolors. Kandinsky stated how important was the artist’s “complete and unlimited freedom…in his choice of means…” (Becks-Malorny, 1994). Can Duchamp’s showing of a urinal in an art gallery in 1917 as a ‘ready made’ piece of art entitled “Fountain” be understood without numerous critical explanations?
Is the artist committed to the spectator, his consumer, to a direct message, to an explanation? Beckmann, who served as the head of the Art Academy in Berlin before World War II, claims states that artists encrypt messages that require the view to have the mental ability for decipherment. Miro was much clearer in his presentation of direct messages in the 1919 poster he designed for l’Instant than his abstract painting of 1926, Man throwing a stone at a bird.” To him,” said Miro, “it might be a bird.” In Matisse’s last years, he created cut-paper shapes painted with gouache, to which he added a Table des Images - a visual dictionary list presenting essential references to the viewer, such as “The Wolf”, “The Cowboy”, “The Heart,” and more (Neret,1994).
Another case is the example of the visual world of Dali, to which the viewer can connect by excavating images and symbols out of his socialistic narrative, associated more with his delusions, dreams and nightmares. From here, the syntax of visual components creates a “story”, challenging our visual library and urging us to understand and search for a meaning: “’Surrealist objects functioning symbolically” (Neret, 2000). Some poets developed a dramatic image form of graphical syntax. The French symbolist poet Mallarmé published his poem Un coup de des (“a throw of the dice,”1897) in 700 words on 20 pages, in a full typographic range from capital, to lower case, Roman and Italic. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Carroll used a variation of graphic image (1866), as did Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto poem Les mots en liberté (1917). In Apollinaire’s cubist poetry, Calligrammes, (1918), the typography becomes a bird, a water fountain, an eye. Gerrtrude Stein experimented with language and form (1920). These experiments helped designers to challenge themselves in creating short visual sentences, using the consumer’s memory and experiential qualities.
Designers for the mass media are basically consumer-oriented, presenting very highly communicative visual and audio-visual messages. Some familiar “icons” and messages are the package design by Mucha (1897) for Nestlé or by Rand for IBM (1965). Other description’s of the creative design environment come from Lubalin’s Marriage (1965);Glaser’s ”I love New York” (1975); Fukuda’s Victory, 1945 (1975); Chwast’s War is Madness (1986); Kalman’s So What is the difference? (1993); and Maeda’s Tap, Type, Write (1999) We are also familiar with a lot of design projects that are not well targeted, and do not deliver their message efficiently.
Designers delivering a message are committed to three major duties: semantics, the extent of the loaded meanings and their deciphering by people from different cultures; syntax, the syntactic relations between the visual components; and pragmatics, the relationship between the components and the viewer, the degree of understanding, mobility and usability.
The visual message is only effective if the Sender-Message-Receiver mission is accomplished, through avoidance and removal of reception obstacles. Many factors are included: order of reception of a message; clarity; power; media and location; the viewer and decoding skills; physical elements, such as message size, viewing distance and viewing environment; the given time to receive the message and the media, with its trends, advantages and disadvantages.
And here lies the central question of our subject in visual ergonomics: How can the effectiveness of the message be ensured? What is the correct hierarchy between the visual components that will ensure effectiveness? On our way to the answer and our presentation of the method, we shall closely examine the consumer and his human trends. We will also examine the way in which visual thinking works, since we may say, in fact, that it is by way of the combination of imagery and texture
The Human Consume
The consumers are you and I, children, adolescents, adults and old people. All human beings are consumers, with psychological factors, anatomy, trends, limitations, weaknesses, feeling mechanisms, dreams and wishes. Scientific surveys and market researches can draw a profile of a consumer by demographics and socio-economic parameters. The consumer’s “needs” are a basis for cardinal reference beginning with product design and ending with message design, which may be a poster, package, homepage or other, but there still exists a domain in the consumer that is odd and difficult to figure out. This hidden area embodies a “black box” whose contents are unforeseen, since it represents a world that is intimate, secret and unreachable: his private, family and communal memories, and loaded with variable data: demographical, cultural, socio-economical, personal and psycho-physical. Actually, this might explain the amazing fact that 90% of the new products presented on the supermarkets’ shelves are rejected by the consumers (Underhill, 2000). Failure rates for other products are within the range of 35%-45% (Business Week, 1993; Crawford, 1987).
So what do we not know for sure about the consumer’s cognition that can cause such a grandiose failure? What do we know about the consumer’s cognitive ability to receive messages, about his information receiving mechanisms: external stimuli at the selling zone, the strategy of exposing the product to him, directing his attention to the product, his perception of the product’s usefulness, the association of the product’s advantages to the brand’s name. His decision-making processes are expressed not only in the way in which he is exploring, storing, using, processing, using and communicating, but also in his mental processes. What happens in his mind as he sees, uses, remembers, thinks, classifies, uses his common sense and makes a decision?
The multi-channeled marketing tries to split the consumer population by the 1\1 consumer-product method. By this method, for example, the Dell Computer Company is capable of giving a special service in which the consumer, whose geographic location at the time of buying is unimportant, can design the specification of the product and its price at the selling zone – his computer keyboard. It is possible that cognitive involvement in processes of this type may lead to reorganization of the product-consumer psychophysical relationship. Cognitive psychology cannot yet provide us with absolute, practical tools that will enable us to fully understand the causes that affect the consumer’s decision making. And here a question arises: Does the perception mechanism create the basis for cognitive awareness confronting personal intelligence? Is it possible to determine that the quality and the nature of the sense receptors are the primary value? Are not the resonance and the quality of strings and wood the main components of the quality of violin’s playing? What about heredity and environment, and intellectual affinities: lingual, motor, spatial, musical, logical, inter- personal and intra-personal capabilities (Gardner, 1993)?
As for the consumer living within a neighborhood, community, society and state - do his decisions originate from being a part of a herd? Some foresee a new era of individualism, where every individual has the right to his very own messages and products. The question is no longer whether to be or not to be, but whether to live in a herd or be a member of a smaller, more exclusive one.
Behavioral scientist Underhill specializing in physical surveillance of buyers at the selling ground (Underhill, 1993) describes the different formats of the relations formed between the products, shelves, the point of purchasing and the message to the consumer. The package, labeling, signs, product location, consumer whereabouts within the store, duration of stay and purchasing, differences between men and women’s shopping styles are all under observation. He clearly marks the act of “shopping” as an inner emotional experience of buying. Do we have an emotional need for buying? Does the act of buying serve as a compensation for a pleasant\unpleasant events, a good\bad day? Each and every one of us probably has a consumer recollection of this type
Visual Attention
An old German saying states that “The eyes believe themselves, the ears believe other people.” People facing an interview are advised to maintain a fine appearance for the first five seconds, after which the interviewer has already formed his opinion. In a mid-sized supermarket displaying about 30,000 items, the average exposure time to consumers is 1/25 of a second (Hine, 1995). A visual attention study inform us that it takes an average of 1.45 seconds for the headline,
1.25 seconds for the pictorial, 4.25 seconds for the text, and 1.04 seconds for the snapshot (Pieters and Rosbergen, 1999).
The suggested method of achieving message efficiency, received from the product, the package and the point of purchase, relates to visual ergonomics in the relationships among the main components: this is the micrography. While the dialog between the consumer and the product, package and point of purchase involves other senses such as taste, touch, taste and smell, there is no doubt that people are, first of all, eye-buyers. From here, we learn of the significance of creating a tempting focus to gain visual attention. On the shelf, all the product alternatives create dynamic movements from one region of stimulation to another. The consumer chooses an alternative: the visual statement of the package has stimulated his motion activity, turned from a collection of visual components into a single “Gestalt” format presence, with new dimensions such as depth and self meaning. The visual image became an icon and always remains the same - this is how a memory unit is formed, enabling the introduction of the product to the consumer, its identification and distinction from its shelf competitors. The product became a low-memory cargo stimulus, an icon, easy to recognize, easy to get attention, easy to remember. You have probably had occasion to notice an intense conversation by a pair of scholars so deeply involved in the vital issues, that they were totally unaware of their surroundings, right until the moment when a woman in a red shirt passed by…
From the designer’s viewpoint, the first stage is getting the consumer’s attention to the product: color, shape, text, picture. The second stage is to create a true interest for a moment, when it is possible to present intelligent claims in favor of the product’s usefulness. At the third stage this information is summarized, making it easy to remember and store. Memory-cheap information is a major value. The consumer can remember no more then seven items (Ogilvy, 1983). The last stage, crucial in many products, is the aesthetic values of the product. The consumer is bound by fashion, confined by brands’ names, follows celebrities and is accustomed to high standards big firms that invest thought, talent and capital to create distinction and uniqueness
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Visual Hierarchy
The rates of efficiency of these four stages is determined by strict planning of the micro: the “atoms” of visual components: image, color, type and form are the four components with thousands of variations. Every visual atom must be completely distinct from the others by design parameters such as style, dimensions, directions, features, simplicity/complexity, visual order, effects, time, connectivity, frequency and rules of visual concretion: visualization-direct, connected and encoded, semantics-direct, indirect or metaphorical interpretation. What is the difference, I ask, between a cook and a chef? They have the same ingredients, but perhaps not the same talent for understanding the total impact of every change in component on the flavor.
The formula is composed of the four visual components: ICTF=ENDLESS.
(I = image, C = color, T= typography, F = form). This is the core of my method.
Image: Examples are a photograph of a child in the bathtub, a painting of a vase, a blueprint of cabinet assembly, a caricature of a politician, and a sketch of an ideal room i a magazine, a cultural icon, and religious icon. While reading these realization means images appear in your mind: the child at the bathtub, the vase, the cabinet, the politician, the magazine, the movie star. The imagery component is the more narrative elements, which relates to us as a “story”, not as a component by itself. We live in a visual culture, where a five-year-old kid spends 3-4 hours a day in front of the television, and thus becomes an expert viewer (= 3 years of constant staring at the screen…). The cinema, video and editing technology have also changed the nature of watching: constant “zapping” between channels, visual experiences at the speed of your eyelids, transfer of images from place to place in real time, inquisitive observation of distant reality, a culture star for a day. Baudrillard’s philosophy concept of “hyperreality”, argues the virtual or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption. TV and computer keyboard displaying a new reality, on-line and off-line. One notices the synchronization in combining images and sounds, used, beside for illustrative purposes, as a mean of creating editing effects, harmony and drama.
Color: The creation of the world, as described in the Biblical book of Genesis, begins with light. Color is a magical visual element, effective as a mean of irresistible influence over the observer. On the physical side it is a diffraction of light seen by man, of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers, to a colorful Newtonian spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. In an enchanting way, this is also the order of colors of the Indian Chakras. The symbolic colors originate from the reality of nature (green- grass, yellow- sun), from our collective memory (for example, enthusiasm that is felt by citizens of a nation in sight of the colors of their national flag), our personal memory (a wound, a dark night, a candy bar) or as a Jungian archetypal color (collective colors of the subconscious: red, black and yellow). The meaning of colors can be cultural, religious or geographical. The color blue is considered feminine in Holland, while in Sweden it is masculine. The color white is a sign of grief in the Far East, while in Israel black is the symbol of mourning. No doubt that the most important factor of color in design is the symbolic colors. Thirty-five years of research on consumer motivation proved the great power of color as a marketing tool (Lynn, 1981). Colors are related to taste, such as the associations hot and spicy\orange; slightly hot\green; sweet\ warm colors; sour\ cold colors; and scented\purple, lilac. Colors embrace psychological meanings of the personality of the painter (Luscher, 1971). Color is affected by the surrounding and vicinity of other colors that create visual effects, as was proved by color researches (Chevreul, 1853). The first work by the Impressionists in 1874 expressed above all,l the results of the practical color studies of Chevreul and Delacroix, and examined the principal of simultaneous colorfulness: white placed around a color will darken it, while black makes them appear brighter, as does gray placed in the vicinity of a color. A light halo placed around the color expands the effect of color contrast, while a color placed near two other colors (where one is dark and the other is light) will strengthen the first, and lighten the second. Different shades of a single color with different saturation placed one next to the other will create a chiaroscuro effect (a theatrical painting effect such as in the drawings of Leonardo, Rembrandt and Caravaggio). A significant difference exists between the colors of light (computer, television, cinema) and color pigments in color cartridges. The coloring power of the shades that exist in graphical programs on the computer, for good or for bad, enormously increases the number of options for using colorfulness. A problem in itself is calibrating the screen and the printer, matching it to the pigment shade of the brush, and to the ink cartridges in the printer.
Typography: Letters and words are the most developed symbols, including pictograms and ideograms. The invention of the alphabet has improved the quality of communication between people. Despite the growing practice of signs and symbols in our days of virtual communication, it is still the word that promises full understanding of the meaning. By the middle of the 70’s due to the massive increase in airline flights worldwide, the American Institute of Graphic Arts working together with the Department of Transportation, equipped airlines with a system of 34 symbols for fast, light communication intended for getting passengers through quickly – especially non-English speaking travelers. The committee that inspected the subject concluded: ” We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is limited. The symbols are useful when describing a service or an object, but far less for describing processes. Only the combination of a word and a symbol can promise the understanding of the message…”(Robinson, 1995).
The development of letter styling evolved along with technology: paintbrush, nib, block print, monotype, linotype, and keyboard. The planning and design of the grid letter was considered long before the days of Leonardo, Bodoni, Dideror, Baskerville, Bayer, Tschichold and Morrison, to be a field of specialization integrated by technological knowledge with a very high degree of harmony and aesthetics. A special distinction is made between letters designed for use in titles and subtitles, and letters designed for the text. A closer examination of the letter will point out its uniqueness and style. The type, size, thickness, direction, color, embolus, distance between letters, between words, between the lines and paragraphs all create a formalist and colorful visual bloc that conspicuously affects its position within the visual hierarchy in a given format. The willingness of the consumer to receive complete information, and the regulations of the law compelling the producer to present it, create a reality in which the product is accompanied a large amount of information.
Negative text reduces its reading rate by 25% (Ogilvy, 1967). Small size, such as 9-point fonts on labels, such as on medicine packages, turns the message into an unnecessary burden, especially as life expectancy is increasing significantly, and adults are becoming a prominent slice of this market (Underhill, 2000). The bold attempts in the field of typography beginning with Weingart, Greiman, and Carson demonstrate a true will to create a visual experience out of letter formation. These attempts challenged the message decoding skills, oppressed the reading process, and therefore did not become a legacy of the whole experience. The commitment for delivering a fast, clear and comprehensible message, at the field of sales and marketing, is the reason that in package decoration, for example, none of the typographical experiments invaded the language of graphic design.
Form: A circle is a circle is a circle. The shape, say the colorists, is a definition of color in relation to background. A shape is an area separated from the rest of the image because it has a contour. A contour is an area of a sudden change in brightness. A visual field that has no contour is called a Ganzfeld (German for a complete region of sight). Without a contour, we might not be able to notice objects, since the contour forms the shape (Matlin, 1983); shape becomes icon when it satisfies unique criteria of distinction from others. The shape of the product or its package is the primary component of consumer recollection. The shape can become an easy-to- store memory item. A bottle of pure lemon juice in the shape of a lemon directly associates the product with its source. A container of disinfectant liquid, whose shape resembles the bird starring in the product’s sales campaign, indirectly associates the shape of the container and its purpose. The box of preserves has not changes since its invention by Aphart in 1809, when he won the contest declared by Napoleon III. The Coca–Cola bottle, resembling a woman’s hips, has remained an icon since its design in 1915. When a shape is in a placed in vicinity of other shapes, a format is created that even has its own unique “formation”, like a flock of birds flying together in a unique formation. When such forms are in the placed near each other, they create visual effects and a formation with graphical impact. The gestalt is occupied with the formative regularity of proximity, vicinity, grouping and continuity. Exercising these regularities in design classes in art schools provides, besides formative awareness, manipulation of visual thinking. In addition, the viewing angle, distortion, joining other shapes, multiplication, plane and more, all turn the basic form into a starting point for design of an icon-oriented object: Rietveld’s Red/Blue chair; Ford’s Model T car; a Chanel No. 5 bottle; Lowey’s Lucky Strike pack; Starck’s juice extractor; Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum; Duson’s vacuum cleaner are some examples. One must remember that the deciphering of a figure that became a sign, symbol or culture dependant icon is based on personal education, exposure and intelligence.
Message Formation
What, then, is the relationship between the components of the following formula: I>CTF. What this formulation means is the imagery dominance of the message. A picture of a baby face on street signs carries most of the purpose of the message. The color, the accompanying text and the shape accompany and support the image and its goals. Table 1 presents a summary of the principles of the formulation of a structure of 16 sets, enabling countless permutations. To simplify, I shall remind us of the fact that if our color plate contains ten thousand shades, for example, facing ten thousand types of fonts then the range of combinations of these two components alone turns out to be, by multiplication, one hundred million possibilities! A similar result arises when substituting different components in the equation, like image and formation. Substituting the four components into such equality calculations, certainly suggests the endless amount of visual alternative that we are facing in organizing a visual plane with the objective of an understandable, efficient, fast and easy to remember message.
Table 2 presents the combinations of three components: font, shape and color. To demonstrate the method, four alternative choices were made, based of choosing the same font. On the upper left: a combination that is a product of a single color, single letter and single form. On the upper right are the same elements with the addition of several shades to the color. On the lower left are one font, one color and three shapes; on the lower right: one font, three colors, three shapes. Table 3 presents a series of three components: font, image, and shape. On the upper left we encounter a single choice of every component participating in the design scheme. On the upper right are three pictures, three types of fonts, and three shapes; while on the lower left are seven types of fonts, six pictures, and one shape
Visual Thinking
The goal of winning the consumer’s visual attention and improving message delivery efficiency stresses compelling standards. Even though we are faced with all the surveys that describe an exact profile of the consumer of all of its aspect, we are still left with the puzzling question of how can we guarantee his complete attentiveness. Let us imagine a supermarket loaded with white bricks without ant visual means of communication. Only one package – ours, of course - colorful and decorated stands before the consumer. Even then I am not sure that our package will gain total visual attention without any disruption or failure. The human perception providing sensual tools of gathering information, the sub-perception unconsciously reacting to stimulation, the system of conditional reactions of the consumer’s social, cultural and other states and condition – all these, and more, cannot guarantee full receiving, understanding and transfer of the message to the consumer. Precisely because of that, the designer, who represents the edge of the effort of the producer, is in great need of a method that will provide him with so many alternatives to develop his creative skills of organizing visual information. Some of the strategies may be unexpected combinations, unusual perspective, repetitions, contrast, rhythms, proportion, balance, movement, sound, sign and symbol manipulation, sensuality, interactive dialog with the consumer, surprises and stakeouts.
Micrography offers a design strategy for interface visual design that creates many alternatives for different visuals. Think of a matrix with only two micrographic components: 10,000 hues and 10,000 fonts. A matrix such as this implies 100,000,000 different visual options! The message deciphering hierarchy ensures us efficiency of deliverance from one side, and also a promise that many different and diverse visuals were accounted for. This method, which explores alternatives for visual solutions, presents a different concept for designing unique and unusual visual messages. This unusual design might be the one to ensure the accomplishment of the goal…if we recall the story of the two scholars and the woman with the red dress!
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