Those who participate in communication are privy to a language
The word “communication” means “to impart, share,” literally “to make common.” It is derived from the Latin: communicare or communis. Communis is a combination of com (meaning “together,” “common”) and moenia (“defensive walls”) which is related to murus (“wall”). As a literal translation from the Latin, “communication” can thus be described as something along the lines of “walking around within the same walls.”
This description of the word leads to a curious and, ultimately, plausible contradiction: it indicates that communication basically describes a process that is bounded. In other words, it suggests that communication is based on exclusiveness and not open-ended integration.
On reflection, the paradox inherent in a universally accepted definition of communication is appropriate, because those who participate in communication are privy to a shared language and congruent knowledge of all the relevant signs (including gestures, body language, fashion), which excludes all those not familiar with the foreign national language or regional cultural system. This reality is problematic because, historically as well as today, communication is ardently (even ideologically) presented as an enthusiastic promoter of openness and integration and design in particular often professes to develop communicative methods for as many as possible, ideally for everyone.
This problem has become even more aggravated over the past few decades. Increasing migration has led to more drastic national linguistic and regional cultural barriers, fueling social segregation and partially dissolving communicative bonds.
On the other hand, this complexity has generated hybrid forms of language and spawned other means of communication, making the task of defining communication media all the more difficult.
These parallel languages, each with their own communicative secrets, develop even within the same broad linguistic community. Young people for instance are constantly creating their own secret languages and signs that simultaneously identify them as an integrated group (or subgroup) and distinguish them from the rest of the community.
A similar phenomenon occurs when specific professional groups use technical language and idiomatic phrasings and, in so doing, ignore any possibility of general communication, or even defy it, in order to demonstrate singularity.
It is important to recognize that the phrases and expressions that, at least partially, abdicate any motivation for universal communication, are also responsible for the dynamic properties of language and other forms of articulation in other words for the development of social communication.
This is all the more true in the globalized world of today, as many people learn to adjust, depending on situation or mood, to different linguistic worlds and to even intelligently play with them ( Globalization).
These changes and shifts in communication have significant consequences for design, as communication design has strived to create and provide universally understood means of communication. At the same time, it is important to remember that design does not exist in a vacuum just like any other language, it has developed its own particular signs and markers that identify its objects and systems to its users.
Any and all designed things will evoke impressions through their forms (meaning also their color, sound, haptic quality, or scent) that themselves communicate value, functionality, means of interaction, possible emotional or intellectual relationships (product semantics), and so on.
Services, when carefully designed, will do the same, as the gestures, dealings, and procedures typical of the service industry are constantly creating meaning through signs and symbols (for example the folded end of the toilet paper roll, indicating that the toilet has been cleaned).
It is not only products and services that attempt to communicate with people, of course, as, very importantly, people talk to each other via products, such as their cars, clothing, watches, eyeglasses, apartment furnishings, or with the food and drink they enjoy.
Communication is never reduced to the purely visual, as it is increasingly common to communicate via the connotations of acoustics ( Sound Design) and haptic signals, even via smells and taste ( Synesthetic).
Some meals are prepared so as to encourage conversation, or to evoke enthusiasm or wonder, and wine is proffered to quicken the spirits of its drinkers and encourage social intercourse (also about the wine), or shared dreams the same holds true for the communal rituals for drinking tea and coffee. Scents and perfumes have been created to produce joy and have an effect on others.
There is a sense behind the German saying “Ich kann ihn nicht riechen (I can’t stand how he/she smells),” meaning, “I don’t like this person.” Medical science established long ago that the sense of touch conveys information about surface, volume, and form and that the sense of hearing is not only empirically the most important source of sensing danger, but also fundamentally establishes substantive communication (which took most designers many decades to fully apprehend). People who have lost partial or complete use of one or more of their senses recognize this in particular.
Despite the importance of all the senses, the preeminent communicative impression is commonly attributed to sight. This is due to diverse historical and psychological reasons that have been explained often in literature (and as evidenced by the expression “I see” meaning “I understand”).
It is no coincidence that optical verification is always referred to as a faithful and objective proof of truth. Accordingly, design, when creating communication structures, almost always engages the visible dimension first and foremost ( Visualization).
Yet, designing the visible requires great effort, given the diversity of artifacts requiring designing and the available material take for example the graphic lettering used to document language ( Typography).
A virtually infinite palette of fonts and symbols has been created, each given a variety of particular features in a variety of languages, and each endowed with designed advertency (such as bold, lightface, larger or smaller, italics). Once a font has been chosen, the designer has the choice of arranging these fonts in an infinite number of ways ( Layout), then of designing the pages that contain these fonts as an integrated visual field, or ordering the sequences of pages in a characteristic manner.
All these design decisions have a drastic effect on readers’ advertency and their aptitude for reading and understanding. In the design process, a range of different texts can be produced even when they are composed of identical letters and words. The written word does not exist in and of itself, but is always designed, with the design conveying and deciding the nature of its legibility and comprehension.
Other fundamental means of visual communication are the logos, trademarks, icons, and symbols that can be seen everywhere and constantly demand our attention.
Pictograms that are used to instruct, warn, or draw attention are an important medium to consider as well they can be found in airports, train stations, and department stores, on signposts and notices, in instruction booklets and on machines. Pictograms are used when the communication of essential information and orders need to be linguistically as concise as possible. It is also clear that these forms of communication, as helpful and useful as they may be, can very often be authoritarian and bossy, as well.
A controversial topic in the realm of visual communications is whether or not the meanings behind these kinds of signs always need to be learned, or whether they could be so fundamentally communicative that they communicate as quasi-substantive signs within a learnable discourse and beyond linguistic singularities.
The question then, is whether there is within the communicative process a potential universal validity for design. This question points back to the problem mentioned at the beginning of this text about a basic multilingualism that on the one hand calls for communicative means and articulation within the relevant language, yet on the other hand is partially supported by a longing for the universal and shared, for communication that “breaks down walls.”
Communication design is at the heart of this contradiction and double requirement, and is actively working on designing new methods, aware of the continuity of communicative experiential processes.