Cultural dimensions of visual communication: An introduction

Visible Language, 2003 by Poggenpohl, Sharon Helmer

the impetus to question the conventions of others and thus our own cultural flow

This special issue addresses a multifaceted communication perspective that deserves our increasing attention. We live and communicate in both global and local contexts, consequently the world in which we live is both large and small. It is peopled with those similar to us and quite different from us in language, culture and communication habit. The need to communicate beyond our own arena of comfort provides the impetus to question the conventions of others and thus our own.

Much has been written in recent years about globalization. For example, David Harvey (1990) has given us a theory of space-time compression. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have speculated about the social and political ramifications of these ongoing global adjustments.

Using a framework from global theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996), it is useful to explore this issue in broader terms. He writes of media and migration as the creators of a global cultural flow. The media present us with news and vicarious experience of other's lives elsewhere under different circumstances of climate, culture, social structure and expectation. Media can be turned off or ignored, but migration is a local fact as a new neighbor cooks things whose smell is unique and unforgettable. And this neighbor may share citizenship and language, yet is keeping alive the culinary heritage of a now remote homeland. Cultures mix and intermingle beyond the borders - integrated into a complex daily life. New cultural hybrids and syntheses evade stereotype; they are created as adaptive responses to complex and changing life circumstances.

Taking the vision of a global cultural flow further, Appadurai creates a framework of five dimensions:

These 'scapes' have irregular shapes and shifting edges, their specific form depends on the perspective from which they are viewed. Inflected by history, language and politics, they are the building blocks for imagined worlds. The global flows revealed by this framework suggest we might now live in a new condition of neighborliness (Poggenpohl & Heskett, 2001).

Communities are increasingly not only in contact, but are interdependent for communal well being - from sharing resources and trade to sharing ideas and human values - from sharing aid during disaster to sharing common visions of a future. Whether the contact is technically mediated or a product of migration, this is a complex interwoven web of humanity with each of us being at times indigenous and at other times the 'other.'

What constitutes indigenous design and what is design for the 'other' is now ambiguous. For example, in Chicago election ballots are now printed in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinese. The 2000 census revealed that the Chinese community in that city had grown to such an extent to merit acceptance of their language in order to guarantee their political franchise. Language is an obvious cultural cue of belonging. And it is a site of conflict dealt with politically and culturally in many ways.

Culture in this issue has at least a double meaning if not more. Culture has referred to specific location, but now with the shifting ethnoscapes mentioned earlier, geography or country of origin is a less certain cultural marker. Culture also refers to complex human associations organized through professional activity, socioeconomic affiliation or other identifiable and variously permeable indicators.

Cultural Dimensions of Visual Communication is a reflection of current themes relating to communication within a global community. The articles can be examined from several overlapping viewpoints: they deal with either processes of developing or making design or of design as it exists in the service of its users, using design; from a geographical perspective, the articles are grounded in Korea/Japan, India, the United States, international travel or cyberspace; and many of the authors reflect on the materiality of communication design or the use of rhetoric. Despite these similarities among the articles, each has a specific and unique core concern. Returning for a moment to Appadurai's framework, the articles reflect his notions of ethnoscape, mediascape and ideoscape.

The first three articles are about making communication in a professional context. The first is about learning to control typographic design, the second is about experimenting to provide alternative structure for the still emerging digital culture and the third is about understanding cultural heritage and influence among designers in a region.

Martha Scotford's article examines language as a cultural divide. In a previous essay in this journal (Scotford, 1988), the author discussed the problem of translation, not just linguistically but also from a glyphic and visual structural standpoint, from Russian to English for Mayakovsky's poem, For Reading Out Loud, as presented typographically by Lissitzky. In the current article her concern is teaching principles of typographic structure and manipulation that transcend a specific language or writing system. Teaching design students in India, the challenge was to explore both Latin and non Latin typographic systems as carriers for English, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, and Malayalam and Tamil to a lesser extent. The book review (and the book reviewed) at the end of this journal, Language Type Culture (Berry, 2002) provide a complementary perspective to this article.