Design for use (which just means designing for people)
Over at Holy Rosary, Fr. Leo once explained that it takes a really creative preacher to connect the day's gospel passage, epistle, and Old Testament reading together in the same homily. Some days, Paul and Mark are both grooving together, talking about prayer or the Holy Spirit, but then you have to slog through a recounting of the generations between Adam and Noah. Sometimes its hard to connect the dots (it's Wysocki; her piece is the genealogy).
But when life gives you lemons: if I squeeze hard enough, these pieces raise different aspects of the relationship between visualization and the human people either about or meant to be used by. Or maybe its just that visual presentation affects our lives (but that does sound a bit like the thesis statement from a literature paper I might have written in high school eg "Conflict is a central theme in The Crucible.")
Goetz's presentation got to this connection most clearly and convincingly. The medical field ostensibly is centered on improving the health of people, so it seems like its an ethical imperative to make medical information usable for the people who need to alter their behaviors. Goetz is right to call pharmaceutical advertising one of medicine's most cynical practices, simply for being deliberately at odds with its purpose. The other examples of data presentation reveal a profession that primarily sees its patients as problems for doctors to solve, as opposed to stakeholders and participants in their own healing. I feel like Godin would look at that blood work report and see it as being created for lab techs by other lab techs, as if nobody else needed to see it. Maybe the "I'm not a fish excuse", as in "I'm not a patient".
So, aesthetics are not ends in and of themselves. The problem with how medical data is presented isn't that its ugly (even though it is), but that it fails its communicative function. It also indicates something of the way the medical profession sees those it serves, as beings reducible to a data readout (and who don't need to read the data). That's where I draw the connection from the very purpose-driven treatment of design by Goetz to Wysocki's treatment of beauty -- design speaks to the social context that it appears in; it isn't neutral. Past that, I struggled. Partially because I live outside the types of places particularly familiar with Kantian aesthetics, I regularly experience the non-universal nature of beauty -- I'm as likely to have internalized the aphorism "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" as I am "Beauty is the faculty of judgment naming my sensory experience of that which is inherently beautiful" or that there is a universal standard of beauty against which all things can be compared. Now, the ways a photographer's lens or an artist's eye can shape or reduce a reality to an object, and what results from that reduction, that is a fascinating question.
But when life gives you lemons: if I squeeze hard enough, these pieces raise different aspects of the relationship between visualization and the human people either about or meant to be used by. Or maybe its just that visual presentation affects our lives (but that does sound a bit like the thesis statement from a literature paper I might have written in high school eg "Conflict is a central theme in The Crucible.")
Goetz's presentation got to this connection most clearly and convincingly. The medical field ostensibly is centered on improving the health of people, so it seems like its an ethical imperative to make medical information usable for the people who need to alter their behaviors. Goetz is right to call pharmaceutical advertising one of medicine's most cynical practices, simply for being deliberately at odds with its purpose. The other examples of data presentation reveal a profession that primarily sees its patients as problems for doctors to solve, as opposed to stakeholders and participants in their own healing. I feel like Godin would look at that blood work report and see it as being created for lab techs by other lab techs, as if nobody else needed to see it. Maybe the "I'm not a fish excuse", as in "I'm not a patient".
So, aesthetics are not ends in and of themselves. The problem with how medical data is presented isn't that its ugly (even though it is), but that it fails its communicative function. It also indicates something of the way the medical profession sees those it serves, as beings reducible to a data readout (and who don't need to read the data). That's where I draw the connection from the very purpose-driven treatment of design by Goetz to Wysocki's treatment of beauty -- design speaks to the social context that it appears in; it isn't neutral. Past that, I struggled. Partially because I live outside the types of places particularly familiar with Kantian aesthetics, I regularly experience the non-universal nature of beauty -- I'm as likely to have internalized the aphorism "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" as I am "Beauty is the faculty of judgment naming my sensory experience of that which is inherently beautiful" or that there is a universal standard of beauty against which all things can be compared. Now, the ways a photographer's lens or an artist's eye can shape or reduce a reality to an object, and what results from that reduction, that is a fascinating question.
Hey Jack, cool post!
ReplyDeleteI really liked your push away from a universal beauty (standard) and that you could really go either way between objective and subjective. However, I think this notion might play into what Wysocki was getting at. There isn't a universal beauty, because beauty is determined by the interplay between the beautiful and the beholder -- both construct and create beauty simultaneously. I guess my question then would be: How do we as writers shape form and content to help redefine beauty if all we can do is put something out into the world and hope viewers determine it to be beautiful? I think that is what the "photographer's lens" or t"he artist's eye"--in the end--is out to do. There are a lot of thoughts swimming around in my mind right now so I hope this makes sense.
Thanks for the post.
Hi Jack! CoOooOol post!
ReplyDeleteI was really intrigued by this line "That's where I draw the connection from the very purpose-driven treatment of design by Goetz to Wysocki's treatment of beauty -- design speaks to the social context that it appears in; it isn't neutral." Not only was this helpful in my own digestion of this weeks reading material, but it is really getting at something I have been trying to grapple with. I think it is safe to say that Goetz believes that (good) design is beautiful as it is presenting its information in the best way possible. This makes me thing about McCandless and his mention of us all possessing a "latent design literacy." Does this perhaps tie into the notion of universal beauty? Or is our latent design literacy based on a particular perception of beauty?