#lecture10

Conversational Voice, Communicated Commitment, and Public Relations Outcomes in Interactive Online Communication by Tom Kelleher (2009)

According to Kelleher, it is desirable for an organisation to communicate with its publics/ stakeholders using a conversational voice. He describes organisations as having a conversational voice when they are able to engage individuals within the publics using a natural style (and it is crucial for the individuals to perceive it as so too).

Although the paper acknowledges the presence of other platforms, it largely speaks about blogs as a platform for contingency interactivity and to communicate human voice. It also mentioned that people perceive crises in a better light when organisations use blogs to handle them. 

Most of the points raised were fair and valid, albeit possibly outdated, looking at the fact that the paper was written in the year 2009. The use of blogs grew exponentially in the early 2000s, and was seen as a novel way for organisations to publish information and news. Fast forward to 2016, many other social media platforms have taken over the domain of providing contigency interactivity. Facebook, Twitter, etc. can be said to be even more “social” of a social media platform than blogs are as they provide more features for interaction. Simply from observation, most organisations now use Facebook to provide updates to their stakeholders. This makes it an even trickier affair for organisations to manage public perception and brand image. Blogs were relatively easier to manage and manipulate impressions as information is conveyed more on a one-way basis.However, brand image is now a two-way curation by both the organisation and the public, as new media like Facebook and Twitter allows us to make our thoughts known to the world within milliseconds.

*Note, if these lecture notes seem disjointed or unorganised I apologise, I tried my best in the circumstances which meant that our lecture was left without any visual aids, thus I found it hard to differentiate between main points etc. * Design Research 1

Week 10

17.5.2016

Less is More, Modernism and the Backlash

Postmodernism and its relation to one another

Fundamental shifts between a pre-modern to modern world

Development of the idea of progress

- History is like a river moving upwards or downwards, having galls and peaks.

- The idea that history and people's lives get broken up into sections, you can see your life through different stages, a good life is one that is lived well overall. In the 18th cent people started to periodize their lives, am I happy now- consumerism and novelty. The ability of things to make you happy. Novelty, shock and sensation arose at this time.

- Resisting tradition. Tradition is downplayed, the Avant Garde idea from the military where they go ahead of the other troops. The innovators

- Trying to look for big explanations to things, why does life go in the way it does?- Modernism is the way of explaining the world

Industrialisation - The industrial revolution is not used as a term anymore, this term was reviewed as they did not want people to think that technology was something that changed the world in an instant

- We put faith into new technology, to make our world better, humanist, scientific, secular capitalism science could explain the world without having to resort to any other way of thinking. The power of the church started to wane.

- The structures that underlay this also underlay people's views on the world, how people saw the world

- Modernist trying to break things into little parts and piece them all together

- Gender, class, were discussed there was a huge rise in the middle class as people realised that they could change classes

- The was this move in the understanding of the principles of liberty and equality  

- This meant that when people should have the right to vote they meant that men should have the right to vote which slowly changed to women and men

- The canals in Britain were the backbone of a society being built and growing as a workforce

- Small groups became larger as people moved hundreds of thousands of miles away

- Communication with families became important to people, letters and postcards became the early forms of social media

- While we believe we are at the cutting edge of change, everyone throughout history, for the most part, had believed this

- Newspaper has become a daily

- Charles Dickens publishes things chapter by chapter- This was because they wanted to bring readership in consistency Transport

- Transport became better as people needed to and became more mobile

- Transport was a huge change

- Nostalgia was treated as a physical ailment, this idea has changed to negative connotations as we are needed to bow down to the characteristics to change.

- Two different ways of looking at the worlds, it was either the idea of the world being made up of single great leaders zeitgeist had the idea that

- People periodized by style fundamentally the lecture is about the individuals

- The design modernist way of thinking is one that relates to stripping things back “It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.” Louis Sullivan - Form follows function has become one of the key mantras to design, the function was more important than form.

- This became gradual strip away of ornamental things within design

- Less is more- compress function. One thing doing two things is better than two things doing one thing separately

- This culminated in the development of international style

- This is how people have chosen to write, understand these but don’t buy into them unquestioningly

- This goes into the 1960s the ‘black box aesthetic’ wrap things into something simple, strip everything back- not done very well by majority of people

- Revival of the international style was held in Switzerland

- This style is picked up in the states by people pulling corporations pulling people into

- Logos give a shape to the product

- Design terms have mentioned have only been mentioned as the high end

- Commercial vernacular- Las Vegas, learning from Las Vegas, less is a bore- opposite idea of modernism. He was responding to what was happening in the 50’s and 60’s.

- Start out with the idea that there is no meaning in life, you as an individual have to find your own meaning. Existentialists are about creating their own values.

- The idea that you only understand who you’re is bought by others' understanding of yourself

- “The gaze” for feminists was not a neutral thing, feminists crit of society.

- In the 60s people rebelled, this was fed by the new philosophical way of seeing the world

- Modernist design was powerful.

- Post-modernist looked under the surface under this

- A number of ideas came out of France, the death of the artist. The author isn’t ‘dead per say’ but the narrative did not like the

- The idea of only having one way to do something has gotten rid of

Language is a structure

- Postmodernism and deconstruction

- Often used as synonyms but they are not

- People started to pick whatever they wanted and put them together

- In graphic design, New Wave design is the introduction of noise, new things create busy things

- This includes the grid, this was seen as the grid being extremely fascist.

- What is important, what is design, what is happening around us, am I conscious of the design that is happening around me.

- What is being authentic?