Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions

by Charles Kostelnick, Michael Hassett

From charts, texts, and graphs to illustrations, icons, and screens, we live in an information age saturated with visual language. Yet the underlying principles that provide structure for visual language have long eluded scholars of rhetoric, design, and engineering. To function as a language that reliably conveys meaning, visual language must embody codes that normalize its practices among both the designers who employ it and the readers who interpret it. In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication—text design, data displays, illustrations—is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, and a broad array of historical and contemporary examples, Shaping The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions explores the processes by which conventions evolve and proliferate and shows how conventions serve as the medium that designers use to shape, stabilize, and streamline visual information. Kostelnick and Hassett extend contemporary theories that define rhetoric as a social act, arguing that visual conventions also thrive within discourse communities and are fragile forms that vary widely in their longevity and scope. Shaping The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions is a thorough guide for scholars, teachers and practitioners of rhetoric and business and technical communication and for professionals in engineering, science, design, and business.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 2003

Reviews

[Chris - Quarter Press Editor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm new to this whole venture, as my department chair recommended that I read this for professional development. And I had mixed emotions for much of it--though this probably leans closer to a 3.5 rating instead. To make things easy, I'm simply going to break it down into what I liked and what bothered me:

Likes:
* At times, the language is playful and fun, given such an academic style of a book.
* Many of the ideas about conventions are extremely interesting.
* For a newb in this area, it was fairly easy to follow / understand.
* I liked the example images, as they felt appropriately chosen.

Dislikes:
* There was a disconnect in the writing. Not sure if it was simply a shift between the two authors, but it seems to move from playful to extremely dry.
* Like others have mentioned, some of the images are on different pages than where they're being discussed, making it annoying to have to flip back and fort to see what they're discussing.
* Many of the ideas / examples are used, and re-used almost verbatim.
* For a newb, many of the outside sources and authors are simply name dropped without much of any explanation as to who these folks are and / or why they're important. (Admittedly, a more familiar reader in this discipline would probably hate such explanations and was happier with the names.)

Overall, it was a valuable read for me, and it already has me thinking about applications in my classroom; however, it often left me wanting more--but not in a good way.

[Aimée]

Primarily written for designers, this book argues conventions are the key to shaping information. The book claims that although we live in an information age inundated with visual language (e.g. charts, texts, graphs, illustrations, icons, screens) the structure of that language evades scholars of rhetoric, design, engineering, etc. “Although scholars have theorized how visual language develops in social and cultural contexts, these avenues of inquiry remain fragmented across many disciplines. Furthermore, scholarship has failed to recognize the pervasiveness of conventions, how users shape and share them in groups, and how designers adapt and combine them for specific situations. As a result, insofar as it functions in any kind of orderly system across the broad spectrum of information design practices, visual language remains theoretically untamed” (4). In the face of that uncertainty, Kostelnick et al posits that in order for us to employ visual language in a way that reliably relays meaning, we must go through a process of normalizing or codifying its practices (for both those who design/create and those who read/interpret). The process the authors describe is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and then modified by users in (visual) discourse communities.

What I like about this book is the wide-ranging use of the aesthetic (although this is not altogether acknowledged). Sometimes it is referred to as a style or genre, sometimes a sensibility, at other times a cultural force. Most scholarship rarely deploys more than one use for the aesthetic. In general, the aesthetic in Shaping Information falls into the category of the discourse community which encompasses “groups of designers and readers and the hierarchical relations among group members that define and certify conventions” (82). The aesthetic is found in the cultural subset of the discourse community, which entails: “values, attitudes and knowledge, including aesthetics, that are shared by members of national or ethnic groups and that shape conventional codes” (82). [The authors claim this but then don’t discuss it].

Regarding the aesthetic, the authors point to two interesting studies: “In separate studies, James Mangan and Rune Pettersson, for example, outline how picture-making conventions reflect cultural and physical attributes of the designer’s environment, while William Horton illustrates the ways in which designers of pictures and icons can undermine their designs by ignoring the cultural values of the users. Those values are invariably linked to aesthetics, a key form of cultural knowledge that often plays an important, yet unacknowledged, role in conventional practices” (4).

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rather dense introduction to visual rhetoric, but with lots of examples to help clarify.