Because the pathway to reason integrates the emotional and the mind comprehends through images, as incarnators of the message of Jesus, Christians have to be cognizant of the communication experience.
Traditional communication design has historically focused on the idea of transmission. The goal has been to “define the conditions that must be met to create a clear message.”[1] Research has, however, revealed that cognitive styles, culture, emotional states, and other dimensions affect the way people deal with information. Communication, then, deals not only with transmission but interpretation, and as such, communication clarity has become relative; there is no one way to make communications clear for everyone.[2]
Focus has now shifted to the idea of communication design, where the focus is now on the audience. “The task of the designer, therefore, is not that of translating with a view to transmitting, but that of creating ‘a space,’ a space where people engage with a message, and develop their interpretations. In others words, designers create conditions that favor the interpretation of a message in a certain – approximately – predictable direction.”[3]
Part of doing that is creating frames for a person’s perceptions, understanding and actions. Framing is the placing of the message in a context for meaning. It is a schema for the interpretation of meaning.[4] This is necessary because people “only understand things that relate to things they already understand…Our previous knowledge provides us with tools for building the frames that will help us acquire new knowledge.”[5] The struggle for a communications designer then is to create appropriate frames and be conscious of the cultural differences that change the meaning of the message.
A biblical example of this can be found in the organization of the Bible itself. The Bible opens with creation and closes with re-creation. The whole Bible is framed as creation/re-creation. Humanity in the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a garden. Salvation, wholeness and peace are found as people move back into the garden. The center of the Bible is the crucifixion, which indicates that the way back to re-creation is the cross. There are many more examples of reframing, those are just a few.
The frame is important for communication, but space is also important. For the past several decades, designed space was focused on consumptive activities. However, new design spaces are emerging. One is what designers are calling experience space where the focus is on doing and using. There is also the adapting space where activities include adapting, modifying, and filling in things in a personal manner.[6] Both of these are emerging from a shift from a consumptive to a creative culture.
People are not sitting passively and enjoying, they are participating and doing. There is interaction.
What this means is that the communicator needs to learn to build “scaffolding for experiencing. A scaffold is a special type of communicational space, one that supports and affords creative behavior.”[7] The essence of this scaffolding is interactivity. Designers create environments where people can interact, adapt and create their own experience within the greater space. Doing so releases control from the designers hands and frees the creativity, learning style, preferences of the individual, personalizing the communicative activity, and creating a meaningful experience for the individual.[8]
NOTES:
[1] Jorge Frascara, Designing Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning (New York: Allworth Press, 2006), xiv.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Richard Bandler and others, Reframing: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Meaning (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1982), 1.
[5] Frascara, vi.
[6] Ibid, 72.
[7] Ibid, 73.
[8] Ibid.
Popularity: 6% [?]
I saw this from a 
I have just uploaded my last research paper before I begin my dissertation. The title of the paper was Designing Communications that Effect Change. I look at how the brain construct our reality, how meaning is constructed, how the brain processes information, and elements of communication that bring behavioral change. I discovered that reason is emotionally constructed (we are emotional beings who think, not the other way around), and thus not nearly effective as stories that touch the heart. We learn predominantly through images, and as a result are all innate semioticians, as the brain processes through neural imagery.
