ultural Adaptation an Information Two Contrasting Views
Charles Kostelnick · 1995
Approaches to using visual language in a cultural context can be placed on a continuum, with global (universal) on one end and culture-focused on the other. Each approach reveals contrasting assumptions about three central design issues: perception, aesthetics, and pragmatics. The global approach is characterized by attempts to invent an objective, universal visual language or to define such a language through perceptual prin- ciples and empirical research. The culture-focused perspective is founded on the principle that visual communication is intimately bound to experience and hence can function only within a given cultural context, to which designers must be sensitive. While the modernist, universal approach has been losing ground to the postmodern, culture-focused approach, the two complement each other in a variety of ways and, depending on the rhetorical situation, offer pragmatic benefits and drawbacks. LTHOUGH cultural issues in professional communica- tion have recently received increasing attention, and practice has become more international, the role of visual language in these developments remains largely undefined. Most of the cross-cultural literature has focused on verbal language-on issues pertaining to translation, stylistic deco- rum, and organization, with many of these studies generating proscriptive guidelines, i.e., how to avoid miscues when com- municating in a global environment. Visual language seems particularly well suited to bridge cultural gulfs-it is malleable and resilient, it is presumably accessible to anyone with the ability to see, and technology now empowers us to variegate and manipulate it. Horton (l) reminds us that communication miscues can also plague document design and provides a host of functional guidelines for avoiding them. Although such guidelines can be extremely useful to document designers, we need a broader framework for analyzing the cultural dimension of information design, one that accounts for the overt as well as the hidden aspects, the rational and the irrational, the aesthetic and the pragmatic.