Visible Language

Critique is a communicative and sociable event in which students present their design and critics provide feedback. Students often find it difficult to explain their work and articulate their thoughts because most design knowledge is tacit by nature. If design is about new concepts, then in a critique, students have to describe and clearly present their idea. However, in critiques, the focus is often on the content, but not as much on the communication competencies of delivering the idea across a group of people. Using a qualitative research methodology and interviewing Western faculty and Asian students, this study explores how communication between Western faculty and Asian undergraduate design students alters the effectiveness and affectiveness of a group critique. Implications of this study provide reflective insights for faculty and students on how critiques can be improved.

Readers need to easily discriminate between different letters, so typefaces are designed to make these differences distinctive. But there is also a uniformity of style within a typeface. These styles are recognized by typographic designers and may be categorized to enable more efficient discrimination among typefaces. The manner in which designers perceive typefaces is explored using the paradigm of Categorical Perception (CP). A continuum of fonts is created by interpolating between two typefaces, and two tasks (identification and discrimination) are used to test for CP. As the application of CP to typefaces is a new approach, various methodological issues are pursued. The experiments reveal that the conditions required to demonstrate CP are quite specific and CP was only evident inTimes and Helvetica and not Garamond and Bodoni. Possible reasons for this difference are the characteristics of the two typefaces and their context of use. Speculation as to the purpose of CP in non-designers raises the under-researched question of how we identify letters in different typefaces when reading.

In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching plot is a static diagram known as Freytag’s Pyramid, which was initially intended for describing classical and Shakespearean tragedy. It has subsequently been applied to a wider range of fiction, but is not always applicable. The alternative interactive forms that we propose allow a more dynamic approach that can be customized by the teachers and students to accommodate various interpretations of a single piece of fiction. We provide a mechanism for people to select significant features of a story, such as characters, objects, events and transitions in time or space, and see how the different models react to the presence of these features. Our designs include one that is primarily sequential, another that emphasizes the structural complexity of the story and a third that places a single feature as a a central focus. The data for this visualization is provided through an XML encoding of the significant features of a given story.