Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication

As the goal of all communication is "to induce in the audience some belief about the past..., the present..., or the future,"' audience considerations are integral components of the process of visual communication. During that process, the designer attempts to persuade the audience to adopt a belief demonstrated or suggested through the two-dimensional object. The purpose of this persuasion is to accomplish one of the following goals: to induce the audience to take some action; to educate the audience (persuade them to accept information or data); or to provide the audience with an experience of the display or exhibition of a value for approval or disapproval, values with which an audience may wish to identify or may wish to reject.2 An exploration of the relationship between audience and communication goals will reveal how belief is shaped through design. The relationship of the audience to the communication process is viewed in widely different ways. In one perspective, the object is seen as isolated as a formal esthetic expression, with the audience consequently, regarded as a spectator. For example, within design competitions, exhibitions, and publications, objects are often displayed with little or no commentary, with no discussion of communication goals. This presentation of design emphasizes the esthetic sensibility of the individual designer' and severs the object from its relationship with the intended audience. Another view characterizes the audience as a passive reader in the communication process. The audience decodes or interprets a visual statement but is not an active participant in the formation of meaning. This view is evident in Hanno Ehses's "Representing Macbeth: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric,"4 in which the designer combines a variety of formal devices to construct different messages and the audience then interprets the message. Ehses's analysis is a grammatical model because it treats design as the construction of statements or visual sentences; linguistic and pictorial content are joined like parts of speech to form the message. In "Representing Macbeth," "classifications of speech," such as "antithesis," "metaphor," and "metonymy,"7 provide designers with a structure for generating a range of messages. The designer begins with the subject and then explores concepts or themes by applying the grammatical model to the subject. In this model, the message 1) RichardBuchanar,"DeclarationbyDesign Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice," in Design Discourse: History Theory Criticism, ed., Victor Margolin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 92.