I found Gunther Kress's discussion of semiotics in analyzing multimodality very interesting, and also his discussion of discourse. It made me want to do an analysis of the office space and work area of my place of employment, similar to the way the Stephanie's bedroom in "House Beautiful" was evaluated for discourse. (pg. 13-19, Kress & Leeuwen)
It's a grey place. The filing and storage cabinets, the counters, the consoles, the cubbies and some of the office equipment are all grey. We do have colored chairs, and burgundy accents in the consoles but it's really not a cheery place. It's a get-down-to business place but the way to really do that is to visually tune out the depressing feel of the place. The coolest thing we have is an old, really huge dictionary on a wooden stand. It really doesn't belong with the look of the rest of the place. In fact, when the building was being renovated we rescued it from ending up in the discard pile.
The discourse of the office space communicates "government" as in no frills. Out in the hallway are photographs of officials standing in front of flags. Most people have few personal items in their offices but some do. Ken's office could double as a green house.
I made consideration of design a priority when I created the user interfaces for my database. The colors are dark and bold, which I was told are better for on-screen. I also used the same design in my documents related to the database.
Soon I will be creating a user's guide for a new database that will likely be multimedia. The discussions of spatial, entry point, visuals and language in "Reading images: multimodality, representation and new media" will be important to me as I design a text document and possibly online documentation. I will be considering the culture of our workplace and creating a document with high usability.
Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold: London.
Kress, G. (2004) Reading images: multimodality, representation and new media. Information Design Journal + Document Design 12(2), 110-119: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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3 comments:
I'm interested in your project to create a multimedia users guide for your database. What do you envision? Do you picture sight, sound? Also interaction? What about applications? Will you use any Flash for animation?
Users guides are often hard for me to use. I always feel like they are being written for someone else -- even though I might be the real user...
I like how you related the reading by Theo Van Leuwen and Gunther Kress to your place of work. From a multimodal rhetorical perspective, there seems to be no end to context, whether burgeoning or via provenance, that we intuit from our environment.
Like Kaleb, I found your discussion of your office space in relation to the Kress and Van Leeuwen reading interesting. There seems to be a disconnect in the way the drabness is intended to convey seriousness and attention to work while also in reality functioning to make people feel a bit depressed by their surroundings.
I'm also interested in Susan's questions about your upcoming user guide project and the ways in which you plan to make it both multimedia AND written for actual users. As you and I discussed last week, I think one of the biggest challenges is the latter in that you have to understand the issues that will concern users and write the guide from their perspective. The use of multimedia might also give you the option of presenting the same information in multiple formats to help make it accessible and understandable to a variety of audiences.
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