The role of aesthetic style in the visual communication of climate change

Public apathy on the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) is widespread, with more than half of surveyed Australians and Britons in denial of the phenomenon. While much is known about media influences and strategies such as message framing, there is little in the way of research on the impact of designed visual communication. This study builds knowledge and challenges assumptions by employing a relational approach between ACC visual communications, the professionals producing them, and the members of society that these communications are attempting to influence, contributing knowledge to the fields of graphic design, science communication and social science.

Time in Perspective: a visual approach to models of time

Geographical representations of topographical space come in many shapes and are a regular topic of discussion. The depiction of the invisible and maybe even illusory concept of time on the other hand, remains largely unchanged and undisputed. A uniform and arithmetic model of time fits well with the rigid structure of digital data, which might be why it has been widely adopted within HCI. In our proposal, we will present historic and contemporary approaches that offer alternative perspectives on the visual representation of time. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

A systematic scoping investigation of cross-cultural visual communication design

This research project provides a systematic and strcutured investigation into the issues associated with the emergent field of cross-cultural visual communication design. The results of the scoping research and the international cross-cultural design project offer clear guidance for designers through all stages of the communication process. 

Place branding and cross-cultural visual communication : how do the theories and practices of place branding inform our understanding of cross-cultural visual communication design?

In a globalised environment, visual communication designers are now required to understand their audience’s needs, values and unique methods of communication, creating a new focus on the recipient. In a cross-cultural design context, the visual communication also needs to appeal to a broad range of stakeholders and multiple recipients who hold a strong emotional investment in the message being sent. Our understanding of the complexities of designing in this environment can be informed by recent developments in the research of place branding where the focus is on the increased possibility for failure, the strong potential for criticism and the issues associated with a broad range of stakeholders.

The outcomes of this connection are explored further in a case study involving eight countries as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, Qatar, United States of America and Zimbabwe. More than 140 student and lecturer participants reviewed a student driven cross-cultural visual communication project that produced over 560 designs. The increased potential for failure and strong, emotional criticism raised questions about the role of images and symbols in cross-cultural visual communication. The impact these have on the reception of the design, challenge our views on the use of stereotypical imagery. This paper will discuss the movement towards designing visual images that are generic and lacking in cultural representation presenting the view that stereotypical imagery is important to the recipient who relies on these cultural references to effectively read the message.

Visual communication design as a form of public pedagogy

This paper identifies visual communication design as a form of public pedagogy. Communication design practices aim to achieve the successful transmission of a message to a recipient in a visual mode. Understanding the theories and practices of visual communication design can assist in enhancing the reception of the communication, as these practices become a tool to increase the effectiveness of learning in a public space. To demonstrate this, I will use the example of museums as an informal place of public learning, and argue design, and in particular visual communication design strategies, are extremely important in the creation of successful learning. If participants are not engaged or entertained, their capacity for learning will diminish. Engagement depends on the representation of the information and the successful interpretation of that information by the visitor. Further, this paper will emphasize the vital role communication design plays in all forms of public pedagogy, not just within the museum context. However, non-designers create many public learning environments and although this paper argues the benefits of communication design to increasing the effectiveness of learning, it recognizes the narrow opportunities of applying this knowledge.

On the reliability of visual communication in vertebrate-dispersed fruits

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Visual communication stimulates reproduction in Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus (L.)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Visual communication in Brazilian species of anurans from the Atlantic forest

Visual communication is widespread among several anuran families, but seems to be more common than currently thought. We investigated and compared visual communication in six species of an anuran community in the Brazilian Atlantic forest. Four are nocturnal species: Hyalinobatrachium uranoscopum (Centrolenidae), Hyla albomarginata, Hyla sp. (aff. ehrhardti), and Scinax eurydice (Hylidae), and two are diurnal species: Hylodes phyllodes and Hylodes asper ( Leptodactylidae). For H. uranoscopum, H. albomarginata, S. eurydice, and H. phyllodes, this is the first record of visual communication. Observations were made at Nucleo Picinguaba, Parque Estadual da Serra do Mar, in the Municipality of Ubatuba, State of São Paulo, Brazil. Descriptions of behaviour were based on individuals observed in the field, using sequence sampling with continuous tape recording for behavioural observations. Eight new behaviours are described: body wiping, face wiping, jump display, leg kicking, limb lifting, mouth opening, toe flagging, and vocal sac display. of the 42 anuran species known from Nucleo Picinguaba, at least six ( approximately 14%) display visual communication. The evolution of visual signals in these species may be related to the availability of ambient light, the structural complexity of the habitat, and/or the ambient noise. They may also have evolved to aid in the location of the individual, to avoid physical combat, and/or may be a by-product of seismic communication.

Characterizing background heterogeneity in visual communication

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Do challenge, task experience or computer familiarity influence the learning of historical chronology from virtual environments in 8–9 year old children?

Studies examined the potential use of Virtual Environments (VEs) in teaching historical chronology to 127 children of primary school age (8–9 years). The use of passive fly-through VEs had been found, in an earlier study, to be disadvantageous with this age group when tested for their subsequent ability to place displayed sequential events in correct chronological order. All VEs in the present studies included active challenge, previously shown to enhance learning in older participants. Primary school children in the UK (all frequent computer users) were tested using UK historical materials, but no significant effect was found between three conditions (Paper, PowerPoint and VE) with minimal pre-training. However, excellent (error free) learning occurred when children were allowed greater exploration prior to training in the VE. In Ukraine, with children having much less computer familiarity, training in a VE (depicting Ukrainian history) produced better learning compared to PowerPoint, but no better than in a Paper condition. The results confirmed the benefit of using challenge in a VE with primary age children, but only with adequate prior familiarisation with the medium. Familiarity may reduce working memory load and increase children’s spatial memory capacity for acquiring sequential temporal-spatial information from virtual displays. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Joseph Priestley: the man who drew time

The Joseph Priestley House Museum at Northumberland, Pennsylvania became interested in Priestley's pioneering timelines as a complement to his better known work in chemistry, electricity, biblical scholarship and political radicalism. Boyd Davis wrote this short article for the newsletter published by the Friends of the museum. The article concentrates on the connections between Priestley, his French contemporary Barbeu-Dubourg and Benjamin Franklin at the time of the struggle for American Independence, and Priestley's two key chronographic innovations: the use of drawn or printed lines to represent the duration of lives, and the associated use of dots to show when the dates of such lives are in doubt or dispute. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Human-Centric Chronographics:Making Historical Time Memorable

A series of experiments is described, evaluating user recall of visualisations of historical chronology. Such visualisations are widely created but have not hitherto been evaluated. Users were tested on their ability to learn a sequence of historical events presented in a virtual environment (VE) fly-through visualisation, compared with the learning of equivalent material in other formats that are sequential but lack the 3D spatial aspect. Memorability is a particularly important function of visualisation in education. The measures used during evaluation are enumerated and discussed. The majority of the experiments reported compared three conditions, one using a virtual environment visualisation with a significant spatial element, one using a serial on-screen presentation in PowerPoint, and one using serial presentation on paper. Some aspects were trialled with groups having contrasting prior experience of computers, in the UK and Ukraine. Evidence suggests that a more complex environment including animations and sounds or music, intended to engage users and reinforce memorability, were in fact distracting. Findings are reported in relation to the age of the participants, suggesting that children at 11–14 years benefit less from, or are even disadvantaged by, VE visualisations when compared with 7–9 year olds or undergraduates. Finally, results suggest that VE visualisations offering a ‘landscape’ of information are more memorable than those based on a linear model. Keywords: timeline, chronographics

Scholarly chronographics: can a timeline be useful in historiography?

Our paper is concerned with the visualisation of historical events and artefacts in the context of time. It arises from a project bringing together expertise in visualisation, historiography and software engineering. The work is the result of an extended enquiry over several years which has included investigation of the prior history of such chronographics and their grounding in the temporal ontology of the Enlightenment. Timelines - visual, spatial presentations of chronology - are generally regarded as being too simple, perhaps too childish, to be worthy of academic attention, yet such chronographics should be capable of supporting sophisticated thinking about history and historiography, especially if they take full advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies. They should enable even professional academic historians to 'make sense' of history in new ways, allowing them insights they would not otherwise have achieved. In our paper we highlight key findings from the history of such representations, principally from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and show how, in a project to develop new digital chronographics for collections of cultural objects and events, we have explored new implementations of the important ideas we have extracted about timewise presentation and interaction. This includes the representation of uncertainty, of relations between events, and the epistemology of time as a 'space' for history. We present developed examples, in particular a chronographic presentation of a large database of works by a single author, a composer, and discuss the extent to which our ambitions for chronographics have been realised in practice. Keywords: timeline, chronographics